Citation

Oliver MC, Jesús LC, Ian P, Ma MP, Manuel UJ, Edwards RM, Ivan RC, Pedro RA, Jorge A VC. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019; 16(12): e16122128.

Affiliation

Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Colima, Colima 28400, Mexico. jvelazco@ucol.mx.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/ijerph16122128

PMID

31208126

Abstract

Resilience is an indicator of the ability of systems to withstand disruption within acceptable degradation parameters and also their recovery time. It is essential for public policies to understand how the population reacts to a particular risk. In this paper we have performed a study that quantitatively measures perceptions of flooding and resilience to flooding in the city of Colima-Villa de Alvarez, Mexico 2018-2019. A resilience index has been applied to ten zones of the city. In our research we assessed risk perception through a city-wide survey with questions based on a Likert scale. An analysis was performed on public knowledge of the existing security protocols for floods and evaluated the public perception of the availability of critical services, such as fresh water, electricity, food, drainage, communications and public transport during a flash flood events. This research has identified populated low resilience zones that can be considered as priorities for resource and effort to mitigate floods and their impacts. The novel resilience index developed in this work can also be applied to other type of risk that humans face and used as a basis for discussions about urban resilience.

Language: en

Keywords

Likert; flooding; resilience; risk perception