Disaster resilience in a flood-impacted rural Australian town

Helen Boon ()

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2014, vol. 71, issue 1, 683-701

Abstract: This paper reports exploratory research conducted in a flood-impacted rural Australian town to identify the factors which residents perceived as supporting community resilience to disaster. There is a gap in this research area centred in the Australian disaster context. Since Australia is predicted to be highly impacted by the effects of climate change in the form of an increased incidence of flooding, an urgent need exists to examine the factors that confer resilience to disaster-impacted localities to inform suitable disaster mitigation and adaptation policies for the future. Because of the complexity of community resilience and its interrelationship with individual resilience, a multi-method approach was used: a demographic study to assess community stability and functioning before and after the flood disaster, focus group interviews to obtain from community members their views on what supported them and their community resilience and a survey to generalise the interview findings. Our operating hypothesis was that individuals remaining in the town post-flood were likely to be resilient to the flood disaster. The demographic study results pointed to a resilient community after the floods as they reflected stability in population numbers and socio-economic indicators. The interviews and survey showed that individual resilience was promoted by social connectedness and a sense of place, a factor that was also negatively linked to the desire to relocate from the community. The use of structural equation modelling of our results provided verification of prior research findings about the role of sense of place in supporting individuals’ resilience. Results are discussed in the context of future climate change adaptation policy. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Keywords: Resilience; Disaster; Community; Climate change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-013-0935-0 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:71:y:2014:i:1:p:683-701

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-013-0935-0

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().