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Urban communities can be faced with many destructive events that can disrupt the daily functioning of activities and livelihood of people living in the communities. In this regard, during the last couple of years, many governments have put a lot of efforts into building resilient urban communities. Essentially, a resilient urban community has the capacity to anticipate future disasters, prepare for and recover timely from adverse effects of disasters and unexpected circumstances. Considering this, it is therefore important for the need to continuously review the existing urban community resilience indicators, in order to identify emerging ones to enable comprehensive evaluation of urban communities in the future against unexpected events. This study therefore aims to conduct a systematic review to develop and critically analyse the emerging and leading urban community resilience indicators.

Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRSIMA) protocol, 53 journal articles were selected using Scopus. The selected papers were subjected to thorough content analysis.

From the review, 45 urban community resilience indicators were identified. These indicators were grouped into eight broad categories namely, Socio-demographic, Economic, Institutional Resilience, Infrastructure and Housing Resilience, Collaboration, Community Capital, Risk Data Accumulation and Geographical and Spatial characteristics of community. Further, the results indicated that the U.S had the highest number of publications, followed by Australia, China, New Zealand and Taiwan. In fact, very few studies emanated from developing economies.

The outputs of this study will inform policymakers, practitioners and researchers on the new and emerging indicators that should be considered when evaluating the resilience level of urban communities. The findings will also serve as a theoretical foundation for further detailed empirical investigation.

This paper aims to discuss the development of two toolkits that were designed to help communities and households measure their level of disaster resilience and provide practical tools to help them increase and maintain these levels.

The toolkits were developed across two studies, with the community toolkit development being undertaken first. A literature review was conducted to develop a definition and model of community disaster resilience; and a Scorecard was designed to assess levels of existing community disaster resilience. The definition and Scorecard were reviewed and refined with the help of two communities before a final version was trialled in four communities across Australia. The household toolkit project followed a similar approach, with trialling being undertaken in conjunction with two non-government organisations that carry out outreach work in the community.

The development and trial of the Scorecards was extremely valuable. The conclusion voiced by communities and reached by the study project teams was that the user-friendly Scorecard is a workable tool for people to assess their household and community disaster resilience and to come together to plan what might further strengthen resilience. Critical to the Scorecards’ success was an understanding of the purpose of the assessment tool and the meaning of resilience.

The toolkits take an all-hazards approach and help community members, individuals and local policymakers to set priorities, allocate funds and develop emergency and disaster management programmes that build local community resilience.

When the devastating 6.3 magnitude earthquake hit Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand on the 22 February 2011 the landscape of the city and its communities were irrevocably changed. The purpose of this paper is to provide case study evidence demonstrating the role of a grassroots organisation in shaping a community defined concept of resilience through self-organised disaster response action.

The case organisation, Project Lyttelton is a community group, located in the suburb of Lyttelton, dedicated to building community and resilience through local projects and action. This case study was conducted through in-depth qualitative interviews with key members of the organisation, as well as key individuals in the broader community.

This research has found that Project Lyttelton played a strong role in providing avenues for citizen participation post disaster. Of particular significance was the role of the timebank in providing an already established network for active participation by citizens in the response and recovery. Other findings outline the importance of pre-disaster community activity for facilitating social support and social learning.

This research contributes to the literature by providing case study evidence for the value of a community led and defined framework of resilience. The findings of this work support the need for further integration and support for local community led preparedness and response initiatives and demonstrate the possible value of pre-disaster community preparedness activities. Consequently, this work is of use to academics interested in the role of community following disasters, as well as emergency management practitioners interested in possible pathways for fostering and encouraging locally focused disaster preparedness activities. The findings may also be of interest to community groups working in the sphere of community building and resilience.

Disaster education is considered as a newly emerging area of research and practice, which promotes community-based educational approaches for building resilience. Given the atypical nature of these disturbances, people and communities need to develop the knowledge required to anticipate and understand what they could have to contend with and proactively develop strategies that can minimize their risk and afford ways to cope with and adapt to adverse situations in an effective manner. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that informal education resulting from daily activities related to work, family life, or leisure can be harnessed to develop disaster resilience within community settings.

This conceptual paper provides the discussion and synthesis of literature covering community resilience, disaster risk reduction (DRR) and informal education. In doing so, this study proposes a conceptual framework and implementation strategies for harnessing informal education in building community resilience.

To harness informal disaster education for community resilience, the authors suggest a conceptual framework and four implementation strategies with the corresponding implications: cultivate social environment for conversations, discussions, reflections and learning; design social activities for promoting and encouraging informal learning; appropriate interventions by informal educators in social activities; and transparent resources and channels for information and social supports. A compilation of a number of community-based DRR practices involving civil society organizations has been incorporated in the proposed framework for exemplifying informal disaster education for community resilience.

Promoting informal education in community settings is aimed at building community resilience in a collective way, which is especially important in disaster-prone areas. Informal education for community resilience not only educates individuals how to deal with disasters, but also connects individuals together to be more resilient in their ability to cope or bounce back from adverse events in their life.

The paper identifies a role for public relations in disaster management by analysing disaster and communication managers' understanding of community resilience and their use of communication in the context of two different cultural environments.

The research study comprised 51 in-depth qualitative interviews with disaster managers in Sri Lanka and New Zealand, which were thematically analysed using the software programme NVivo 10.

The study identified cultural differences in Sri Lanka and New Zealand that impact on how managers' communicate in natural disaster situations. The findings indicated that public relations’ understanding of communities’ cultures, their communication, networking and lobbying skills could further enhance the effectiveness of efforts to build community resilience to disasters.

Nations are complex multicultural realities; the findings cannot be generalized to make claims about how natural disasters are managed in different national contexts.

The paper identifies the unrealized potential of public relations’ expertise in communication, community relations, networking and lobbying to contribute to building community resilience to natural disasters.

By supporting efforts to build community resilience to disasters, public relations practitioners can contribute to social well-being in times of catastrophic natural disasters.

The paper adds an innovative perspective to public relations crisis literature by identifying the potential contribution of public relations’ concepts and practices to build community resilience to natural disasters. It demonstrates how sociocultural differences may affect disaster communication strategies.

This study aims to characterize the main research areas of published works, identify the disciplines that associated with the works and propose research agendas for future inquiries, based on a systematic literature review that encompasses 89 research papers from 2010 to 2020.

This review commenced with the definition of the three research questions, and subsequently three steps were followed: (1) defining criteria for research paper selection; (2) specifying the data bases and selecting the papers based on the criteria and (3) data analysis, conclusion and discussion of selected papers. The search was limited to the selection of research papers in English, focusing on “community disaster resilience” which is the subject of this review and referred to as keywords which were used for the online search for papers. All these three words must be present in the title of the selected papers.

The area “resilience management” and “disaster resilience assessment” accounted for 43% of the studies, and it indicates that research has emphasized the description of how community disaster resilience has been managed and assessed. Three disciplines relating to disaster resilience are disaster risk science, public health and environment, and it indicates that research has fostered core areas of community disaster resilience. Three key research agenda include a growing trend to describe successful efforts to avert a potentially catastrophic disaster through solution-based case studies; a paradigmatic shift and implementation of how communities could help the disaster victims recuperate from disasters.

This review is limited to the numbers of chosen papers, as only full papers were chosen. However, in order to establish more rigorous and inclusive results of the study, the numbers of citations of published papers to be chosen for future inquiry should be taken into account.

This present review originally investigated how the concept of disaster resilience has been applied at the community level and in related areas. As resilience is a multidisciplinary concept that has been investigated by several different disciplines, such as sustainability, psychology, economy and sociology, this study looked into how disciplines related to community disaster resilience to provide agenda for future inquiries. This study therefore characterized the main research areas of published works, identified the disciplines that associated with the works and proposed a research agenda for future inquiries.

The purpose of the current literature reviews to contribute to the study of organisational resilience. The study intends to understand the role of dynamic capability flow in creating more resilient business communities. The study tries to relate to how continuous learning enables business communities to plan for, respond to and bounce back from disasters.

A structured literature review of 38 empirical studies indicates organisational resilience and highlights the dynamic attributes of organisational resilience and the importance of knowledge interactions and information sharing.

Continuous learning results in complex dynamic capability manifested through research and innovations, technological implementations, social learnings and community knowledge sharing. This clearly emphasises the role of dynamic capabilities in fostering disaster resilience in organisations and business communities.

Research limitations on continuous learning can be cited as to incorporate case study methods related to organisational experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic while also reviewing digital knowledge transfer strategies and influencing factors.

The study for fostering resilience in the business ecosystem needs to be embedded in the continuous learning process, and it also includes knowledge sharing and collaboration, both externally and internally, for the business community.

Social implications for this study relate to the seamless flow of the knowledge transfer and knowledge sharing process. The dynamic process of organisational and the business community resilience is a key outcome of this knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer process.

A conceptual framework was developed from the review, emphasising how dynamic capabilities through continuous learning enhance business community resilience.

The paper aims to examine the conditions under which disaster entrepreneurship contributes to community-level resilience. The authors define disaster entrepreneurship as attempts by the private sector to create or maintain value during and in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster by taking advantage of business opportunities and providing goods and services required by community stakeholders.

This paper builds a typology of disaster entrepreneurial responses by drawing on the dimensions of structural expansion and role change. The authors use illustrative case examples to conceptualize how these responses improve community resilience by filling critical resource voids in the aftermath of natural disasters.

The typology identifies four different disaster entrepreneurship approaches: entrepreneurial business continuity, scaling of organizational response through activating latent structures, improvising and emergence. The authors formulate proposition regarding how each of the approaches is related to community-level resilience.

While disaster entrepreneurship can offer for-profit opportunities for engaging in community-wide disaster response and recovery efforts, firms should carefully consider the financial, legal, reputational and organizational implications of disaster entrepreneurship.

Communities should consider how best to harness disaster entrepreneurship in designing their disaster response strategies.

This research offers a novel typology to explore the role that for-profit firms play in disaster contexts and adds to prior research which has mostly focused on government agencies, non-governmental organizations and emergency personnel.

The purpose of this paper is to develop government and community-level critical thinking, planning, and action for improving community disaster resilience by reporting a study that sought to evaluate the possibility of using the Torrens Resilience Institute Australian Community Disaster Resilience (CDR) Scorecard in the Malaysian context.

A participatory action research approach (done in 2015) encouraged key people involved in managing the 2014 Kelantan floods in Malaysia’s north-east to participate in discussions about, and self-testing of, the CDR Scorecard to measure and improve their communities’ disaster resilience.

The CDR Scorecard can be useful in the Malaysian community context, with some modifications. Self-testing revealed that participating communities need to strengthen their disaster resilience through better communication, cross-community cooperation, maximizing opportunities to compare their plans, actions and reactions with those reported in research publications, and aligning their community disaster management with reported best practice internationally while acknowledging the need to adapt such practice to local contexts.

There is a need for a Malaysia-wide, simple-to-use, standardized disaster resilience scorecard to improve communities’ quality, self-efficacy, and capability to facilitate improved disaster resilience.

The adaptation of Australian CDR Scorecard for used in the country.

Awareness of CDR level will enhance community and government preparedness, mitigation, and responses to flood disaster.

This project is the first of its kind in Malaysia. It provides an example of the possibilities of using the CDR Scorecard globally in the form of a context-specific toolkit. The engagement of key people in the community in self-testing the Scorecard provides genuine, on-the-ground, real life data, giving others an understanding of local assessment of each community’s resilience level.

As noted in the Department of Homeland Security's National Response Framework, disasters are inherently local and ultimately the responsibility of the lowest jurisdictional level present within the impacted area. Given these parameters, this paper aims to sharpen the concept of national resilience by recommending a framework which positions community resilience as an integral variable in understanding the ability of impacted areas to effectively manage the consequences of disasters. Conceptualized as a dependent variable, community resilience is influenced by the relationships government (public) agencies develop with private sector partners and the resilience of relevant supply chains and critical infrastructures/key resources which exist in their communities.

The authors augment a topical literature review of academic and practitioner journals by synthesizing existing findings into a holistic framework of community resilience.

This paper argues that interdependent systems like social and economic networks will ultimately influence the ability of communities to adapt and respond to the consequences of disasters. In addressing the resilience of these systems, all levels of government must recognize and embrace the public‐private interfaces that can improve their ability to manage the response and recovery phases of disaster management. While 85 percent of critical infrastructure is owned by the private sector, 100 percent of it exists within communities and impacts the ability of the nation to recover from disasters. Resilience calls upon active management and relies upon assessment and a willingness to take action in the face of adversity.

Resilience is discussed within economics, behavioral sciences, supply chain management and critical infrastructure protection. This paper integrates these research streams to develop a framework for shaping national resilience.