Community resilience for urban flood-prone areas: a methods paper on criteria selection using the Fuzzy Delphi method
Continuity & Resilience Review
ISSN: 2516-7502
Article publication date: 6 August 2021
Issue publication date: 14 September 2021
Abstract
Purpose
Community resilience decides a lot on a city's ability to withstand an external shock. It has evolved naturally from a bounce-back approach to a more robust and meaningful bounce-forward process. The study explores gaps found in community resilience and finds that criteria specific to different disasters are absent.
Design/methodology/approach
The study uses a multi-criteria decision analysis technique, fuzzy Delphi, to select criteria. Derivation of the initial list of criteria was from a pilot study, a focus group discussion and other literature studies which was followed by the fuzzy Delphi survey.
Findings
After two rounds of fuzzy Delphi analysis, the consensus among 65 experts resulted in selecting 125 sub-sub-criteria within seven criteria. Findings show that many criteria previously not discussed in other pieces of literature project high fuzzy scores such as “availability of drinking water post-disaster” and “cracking down fake news spreaders by the police”. In addition, positive cooperation between political and religious institutions have proven to expedite disaster recovery.
Research limitations/implications
The future scope also includes weighing the selected criteria using analytical hierarchy process (AHP).
Practical implications
Policymakers in the disaster management domain can use the study findings in implementing effective disaster mitigation strategies.
Originality/value
The selection of criteria is based on the community resilience shown by the Kerala community during the floods of 2018 and 2019 (in Kerala). Measures demonstrated by the community need to be studied, which will help foster disaster mitigation better in future scenarios.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Funding: The research leading to these results has received funding from the Ministry of Education, India (formerly the Ministry of Human Resource Development). Grant recipient‐ Sameer Ali.
Citation
Ali, S. and George, A. (2021), "Community resilience for urban flood-prone areas: a methods paper on criteria selection using the Fuzzy Delphi method", Continuity & Resilience Review, Vol. 3 No. 2, pp. 166-191. https://doi.org/10.1108/CRR-05-2021-0021
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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