Dr. Stephanie Chang and her team at the University of British Columbia understand that when designing appropriate solutions to combat rising sea levels, climate change and extreme weather, effective risk reduction and resilience strategies must consider local hazard and vulnerability contexts.
Resilient-C is an online platform assisting over 100 coastal communities in British Columbia and Nova Scotia in identifying other communities with similar coastal hazards and vulnerabilities. The objective of the platform is to provide guidance to help communities learn from places that face similar challenges, facilitate learning, transfer knowledge and share resources aimed at reducing vulnerability and risk.
Rather than identifying places that may be most vulnerable, the approach is intended to identify places that are similarly vulnerable, in order to facilitate building networks for disaster resilience
Chang et al. (2018). Community vulnerability to coastal hazards: developing a typology for disaster risk reduction.
Using what they call the “Hazard Vulnerability Similarity Index” (HVSI), communities that form part of the platform are classified using 25 quantitative and qualitative indicators. These indicators are grouped by:
- Economic capital: financial resources and structures in place that may increase or decrease resilience and vulnerability to coastal hazards.
- Social capital: community size, structure, and the integration of community members. These indicators can help predict a community's ability to rebuild from, resist and adapt to natural hazards.
- Built environment capital: the size, structure, and connectedness of residential, commercial, industrial, and government structures and institutions - not simply within the community, but in relation to its neighbours.
- Natural environment capital: the physical, geographic and ecological interactions of this community with the natural world.
- Institutional capital: local governance, along with the the size, structure and capacity of a community to prepare for, respond to, or recover from a hazard.
On the Resilient-C web platform, anyone can register and access data. You are able to search and identify communities facing similar challenges using any or all of the 25 indicators.
The team behind Resilient-C spent the past two years parsing through data to update indicators, expand upon their geospatial data, and include 53 new Nova Scotian communities. Over the next couple of years, the team plans to include communities in PEI, Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick and Quebec. Ultimately, the goal is to make Resilient-C the go-to platform for connecting communities who otherwise may not know that their own struggles are also challenging similar communities across the country.
For more information about Resilient-C, please visit their website. You can also read the academic literature detailing the HVSI and additional research emerging from the project:
Academic Literature
Chang, S. E., Yip, J. K., van Zijll de Jong, S. L., Chaster, R., & Lowcock, A. (2015). Using vulnerability indicators to develop resilience networks: a similarity approach. Natural Hazards, 78(3), pp. 1827–1841. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-015-1803-x
Oulahen, G., Chang, S. E., Yip, J. Z. K., Conger, T., Marteleira, M., & Carter, C. (2017). Contextualizing institutional factors in an indicator-based analysis of hazard vulnerability for coastal communities. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, pp. 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2017.1399109
Chang, S. E., Yip, J. Z., Conger, T., Oulahen, G., & Marteleira, M. (2018). Community vulnerability to coastal hazards: developing a typology for disaster risk reduction. Applied Geography, 91, pp. 81–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2017.12.017