1. Introduction
Global climatic and environmental changes have escalated both the frequency of and losses from disasters in recent years [
1,
2,
3]. Consequently, forced displacements due to disasters, together with economic and social marginalization, are challenging communities’ capacity to build resilience against shocks and stressors, such as those that are associated with disaster events. Thus, understanding a community’s ability to respond and recover from disasters and enhancing the overall capacity to build safer communities has been a major priority of many disaster risk reduction (DRR) programs and policies [
4]. In this case, resilient communities are defined as “societies which are structurally organized to minimize the effects of disasters, and, at the same time, have the ability to recover quickly by restoring the socioeconomic vitality of the community” [
5].
In recent decades, researchers and practitioners have become increasingly interested in measuring a community’s degree of resilience as a starting point for developing strategies and taking actions toward the effective implementation of DRR programs and policies that aimed at building community disaster resilience [
6,
7]. Likewise, international development organizations have applied enormous effort and resources toward building resilient communities so that shocks and stresses can more easily be absorbed during adverse conditions, and communities can bounce back better and more quickly move toward resilience. Such abundant resources being devoted to these programs should put communities in a better position to build adaptively/sustainably into the future. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR) clearly states that building disaster-resilient communities is the major goal for 2015–2030. Out of its four priorities of action, ‘investing in disaster risk reduction for resilience’ is one of the main thrusts of the programs. Building from the Hyogo Framework for the Action (2005–2015) achievements, SFDRR calls for the higher investment in disaster risk reduction programs to build more resilient communities [
8]. However, an evaluation of progress toward community resilience requires an initial baseline understanding of community resilience. How can one measure “more” resilient communities without first understanding where a community is situated on a resilience trajectory? In Nepal, no such understanding of resilience exists. Analyzing and benchmarking community resilience based on available relevant community characteristics and variables can be utilized to address this gap.
Resilience measurement, primarily operationalized through metrics and framework development, provide baseline indices that offer rich insight into a community’s disaster resilience [
6,
9]. Based on specific community characteristics depicting broad concepts of resilience, pre-event conditions of a community can be assessed, evaluated, and compared across space and (given enough data points) across time. Baseline resilience measurements can serve as a focal tool for formulating effective programs and policies prior to the hazard event occurrence. However, indicator selection requires careful consideration, ensuring a reliable reflection of the study area characteristics [
10,
11]. While various methods and measures have been used to examine and estimate community disaster resilience in the developed countries, very few models have been applied toward understanding disaster resilience in developing nations.
Being guided by the Disaster Resilience of Place (DROP) model, this study examines the following research questions in developing community disaster resilience index for Nepal:
Nepal, in particular, is exposed to a multitude of natural hazards and experiences hazardous events on a regular basis [
12]. In 2015, a 7.8 magnitude of earthquake took about 9000 lives and damaged over two million houses, including many critical infrastructure elements, such as hospitals, roads, and bridges [
13]. Moreover, monsoonal floods and landslides, regularly claiming hundreds of lives, damaging buildings, and critical infrastructure, and impeding economic activities annually, impact the country.
Table 1 exhibits the major disasters and their impacts (deaths, injuries, and economic losses) that occurred between 2008 and 2019 in Nepal. Although the country is battered by various disasters each year, there remains a paucity of research that is focused on community resilience across the nation. This study identifies resilience indicators and develops a community disaster resilience index (CDRI) for Nepal. Such measures provide a baseline set of community-level resilience information that was linked with pre-disaster conditions at the village level. Further, this study explores the spatial distribution of resilience, patterns of high/low resilience scores, and the clustering of hot/cold resilience across the country.
5. Discussion
This study constructed a community disaster resilience index (CDRI) to benchmark those baseline conditions across Nepal. The results can provide a measure from which to monitor changes in disaster resilience over time. In addition, this paper mapped the geographical distribution of community disaster resilience at the local level while using indicators relevant to Nepal’s distinct social and physical landscape. Being guided by the DROP model, we identified six components that contribute to disaster resilience in Nepal. Our study provides a nation-wide comparison at the village level while using the most complete and comprehensive datasets available.
The spatial distribution of CDRI scores (
Figure 3 and
Figure 4, and
Table 5) shows that the majority of the Tarai region falls under low and medium to low resilient category. It is important to note that the Tarai region accommodates approximately half of the entire population. Perhaps not so coincidentally, most of these locations are also socially vulnerable [
41]. Further, a recent increase in rural (Hill) to urban (Tarai) migration exposes a significant number of vulnerable populations towards serial and sporadic natural hazards, thus exacerbating their situation [
54]. In recent years, during monsoon season, the Tarai region has experienced recurring riverine and flash flood events and inundation along the Nepal India border. For instance, in the summer of 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018, each monsoonal flood devastated this region claiming hundreds of lives, damaging vital transportation networks, and destroying critical infrastructures [
61,
62]. The probable intersection of growing hazardous events, increasing social vulnerability, and variable resilience weakens the capacity of ‘at risk’ communities to respond and recover from any disasters.
Geographic distribution of individual resilience components (
Figure 2) categorizes different villages with high and low scores. The first component, ‘Infrastructure’, reflects the general trend of urbanization focused in the capital city and along the Tarai region, although a few exceptions are observed in the Mountain region. Likewise, the ‘Environmental’ component shows that capital city Kathmandu is listed in the high category; however, it has the lowest pervious surfaces and it located at a higher elevation than the entire Tarai region. Further, our results reveal that very few “worst hit” communities of the 2015 mega earthquake in eight districts (Dhading, Dolakha, Gorkha, Kavre, Nuwakot, Rasuwa, and Sindhupalchowk) of the central region of the country are categorized as being highly resilient communities. This finding reminds us that measuring community resilience can be scale and context-dependent, and such findings warrant further studies to see the relationship between disaster outcomes and level of community resilience [
47].
A very interesting regional difference is observed between the eastern and western Hill regions given the similar kind of exposure to geophysical and hydro-meteorological hazards (
Figure 3 and
Figure 4). Our spatial clustering map (
Figure 4) identifies a few clusters of high resilient villages in far western Hill districts. These areas have the highest poverty rate in the country (46% living below poverty line), facing chronic food insecurity, and they are facing acute and chronic shocks and stresses, such as flood, landslide, hailstorm, drought, forest fire, low water availability, and soil degradation [
43]), and they were categorized as high social vulnerability region [
52]. Likewise, few western Hill districts (Arghakhanchi, Baglung, Gulmi, and Pyuthan) were classified under the highly vulnerable category in a companion study [
52]. On the contrary, these districts are clustered with high CDRI scores in the current study (
Figure 4). These Hill districts, including Kaski, Parbat, Syangja, and Tanahu, have higher development patterns [
63] following Kathmandu valley and higher water productivity than other districts in the country [
64]. Few clusters in the eastern Mountain region could be attributed to well-developed tourism infrastructure, which has high impacts on our CDRI variables [
65,
66]. Our study shows, in comparison to Aksha, Juran [
52], that resilience and vulnerability are not opposing concepts to each other, but rather they do overlap to some extent [
5,
22]. We employed a bivariate mapping technique to visualize the relationship between social vulnerability and community resilience (
Figure 5). We mapped five categories (High, High-Medium, Medium, Medium-Low, and Low) of social vulnerability [
52] and community resilience at the local level, and found that the majority of Low and Medium-Low resilience categories, and High and High-Medium vulnerability, are distributed in the Tarai region (
Figure 5). Similarly, High resilience and High vulnerability, and Low resilience and Low vulnerability are primarily dispersed in the Hill regions of the country.
We compared distributions of percent villages and percent population in each CDRI category in each district to further elucidate the resilience concept and tie results to specific places on the ground, and found some interesting results (
Table 6). In particular,
Table 6 shows that urban districts, such as Bhaktapur, Chitwan, Kathmandu, and Lalitpur, and Tarai district, such as Rupandehi, have significantly higher population percentages that reside in high resilience areas than percent villages exhibiting high resilience. For instance, Kathmandu district comprises 54.24% of villages under high resilient categories, while it consists of 92.52% of the total population under the same category. Similarly, Rupandehi has only 1.41% of VDCs under high resilient categories, but these VDCs hold 13.55% of the population. In effect, this means that, although there are not large numbers of villages exhibiting high resilience within a district, those that do have higher resilience have more people residing in them. It shows the uneven distribution of population within a geographic boundary and calls for further investigation.
Likewise, the population percentage is always lower than the percentage of VDCs in low resilient categories. Few districts, such as Kailali, Lalitpur, Mustang, and Udayapur, have a significant difference in the medium category of CDRI. This comparison (
Table 6) provides a unique perspective to researchers and practitioners to compare the geographic distribution of community disaster resilience with population and it should be helpful for planners and decision-makers who are routinely looking for the empirical measure when making critical choices regarding who is at risk, vulnerable, and in need of assistance before, during, or after disasters.
Building resilience is a long-term disaster management strategy that requires adequate investment in mitigation, risk reduction, and risk management activities through relevant programs and policies. Building resilient communities has not been a priority of the government although Nepal is exposed to various natural hazards and the disaster outcomes are escalating every year. However, the Nepali government enacted a new disaster management act, the Disaster Risk Reduction, and Management (DRRM) Act, in 2017, which replaced a four-decade-old disaster act, Natural Calamity (Relief) Act 1982. However, Nepal is still struggling to form a functional coordinating agency envisioned in the new act. Moreover, the international development agencies played a positive role to forward disaster risk reduction and resilience in the country, despite the absence of coordinating agency, legislative tools, and political impasse. However, the international development agencies also lack a comprehensive view of disaster resilience, and it is often used as an operational tool for influencing the Government of Nepal [
67]. Additionally, disaster risk reduction activities are primarily focused on a single hazard type. In this way, hazards are perceived as isolated natural processes, and their cascading effects are completely neglected [
68]. Consequently, preparedness and mitigation efforts are deficient in terms of their ability to minimize future impacts from all-to-often compounded events.
Although quantitative approaches are widely used and offer a more systematic and reliable way to measure various dimensions of resilience, the approach has several drawbacks. Quantitative approaches fail to capture less tangible elements of resilience, like social capital or power relations, are often data-intensive and data-driven, and may include researcher’s bias during indicator selection—which is itself a very context-specific as a resilience factor in one community might not be a resilience factor in another community [
69]. Qualitative approaches can complement quantitative frameworks by further including the intangible factors of resilience, such as social cohesion, risk perception, and power relations [
29].
The proposed community disaster resilience index provides an effective tool for identifying community natural hazard resilience individually and in clusters and evaluate, in the context of disaster prevention, emergency rescue, and post-disaster recovery and reconstruction. However, several limitations and deficiencies in this study remain and they should be improved into the future. First, our work could not include variables that were related to institutional resilience, which significantly contributes to overall resilience. For example, disaster mitigation spending, flood insurance coverage, crop insurance coverage, and local disaster training are missing. Unlike the US context, such data is unavailable in Nepal. Second, after normalization of data, the final score is a relative value leaving users without an absolute measurement of community resilience for a given location. Although such relative estimation provides easily understood comparisons between places and it is useful for benchmarking progress over time and across space, it could under- or overestimate community resilience at a particular location. Third, principal component analysis is an efficient way to identify dominant variables in the CDRI, but it cannot explain the dynamic and overarching nature of community resilience [
59]. It is difficult to quantify resilience in many instances because of the qualitative nature of many resilience indicators. Fourth, although census data are the most complete and comprehensive datasets available in Nepal, they lack, including many variables that are relevant to benchmark and measure progress towards disaster resilience and sustainable development in the country. Additionally, it is worth noting that data gathering in high Mountain and Hill areas (refer
Figure 1) is challenging, as these areas are not adequately connected to national transportation networks and pose communication difficulty in many communities, since they may not speak/understand the Nepali language.