City disaster resilience scorecard

Citation

(2014), "City disaster resilience scorecard", International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, Vol. 5 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJDRBE-03-2014-0024

City disaster resilience scorecard

Article Type: News articles From: International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, Volume 5, Issue 2

The United Nations (UN) Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) is working with IBM (New York Stock Exchange: IBM) and global planning, design and engineering firm AECOM to measure cities’ resilience to disasters. The first fruit of the partnership is an innovative disaster resilience scorecard created for use by members of UNISDR’s “making cities resilient” campaign, which has been running now for almost four years and now has > 1,700 cities participating.

Resilience scorecard for cities is based on the “ten essentials” defined by the UNISDR for Making Cities Resilient. This scorecard provides a set of assessments that will allow cities to understand how resilient they are to natural disasters. It is based on the UNISDR’s “ten essentials” (http://www.unisdr.org/campaign/resilientcities/toolkit/essentials) for disaster risk reduction and adds additional detail and quantification beneath the UNISDR’s Local Government Self-Assessment Tool (LGSAT) (http://www.unisdr.org/campaign/resilientcities/toolkit/howto)

It has been developed by IBM and AECOM, who are members of UNISDR’s Private Sector Advisory Group (PSAG) and Steering Committee of Making Cities Resilient Campaign.

The term “resilience” is often taken to include responses to a spectrum of factors, ranging from “chronic” stresses such as environmental pollution, ground water depletion or deforestation, to “acute” stresses such as floods, droughts, earthquakes, hurricanes or wildfires. “Disaster resilience”, as defined here, is at the “acute” end of this spectrum: it covers the ability of a city to understand the disaster risks it may face; to mitigate those risks; and to respond to disasters that may occur in such a way as to minimize loss of or damage to life, livelihoods, property, infrastructure, economic activity and the environment. Clearly, disaster resilience will be affected by the chronic stresses that the city may also face, for example, where deforestation increases the propensity for flash flooding, or where water pollution exacerbates the impact of a drought.

The disaster resilience scorecard is intended to enable cities to establish a baseline measurement of their current level of resilience, to identify priorities for investment and action and to track their progress in improving their disaster resilience over time. It consists of 85 disaster resilience evaluation criteria and focuses on the following aspects:

• research, including evidence-based compilation and communication of threats and needed responses;

• organization, including policy, planning, coordination and financing;

• infrastructure, including critical and social infrastructure and systems and appropriate development;

• response capability, including information provision and enhancing capacity;

• environment, including maintaining and enhancing ecosystem services; and

• recovery, including triage, support services and scenario planning.

Accordingly, the disaster resilience scorecard reviews policy and planning, engineering, informational, organizational, financial, social and environmental aspects of disaster resilience. Each of the criteria has a measurement scale of 0-5, whereby 5 is regarded as “good practice”.

A list of potential cities is being developed to test the scorecard and to support their disaster resilience planning.

The head of UNISDR, Margareta Wahlström, said: “More than half the world’s population now lives in urban centres, and how we manage urban risk will be a key element of the new global agreement on disaster risk reduction, which will be adopted next year and follow on from the existing Hyogo Framework for Action. Our objective is to help cities to plan and build for the future in a way that creates a safer environment for their citizens. I thank IBM and AECOM for their contributions to the cause of urban resilience. It is a good and concrete example of the public and private sectors working together, and we hope that cities will benefit from using this disaster resilience scorecard”.

The scorecard is available at no cost through http://www.unisdr.org/campaign