Integrating Social Equity and Vulnerability with Infrastructure Resilience Assessment
Sunil Dhakal, Lu Zhang
Abstract
Resilient infrastructure, which better withstands, adapts, and recovers from disasters, plays an important role in mitigating the impacts of natural hazards to the communities. However, disparities exist in infrastructure damage and recovery across communities with different socioeconomic backgrounds. Socially vulnerable communities experience more severe infrastructure damage and require longer time to repair and resume infrastructure services. Thus, there is a need to systematically integrate social equity with infrastructure resilience assessment. To address this need, this paper proposes a social welfare-based infrastructure resilience assessment framework that accounts for (1) the unequal distribution of infrastructure damage and recovery across communities with different socioeconomic statuses and (2) the potentially higher infrastructure damage and longer recovery time in socially vulnerable communities. The proposed model can facilitate equitable resilience in infrastructure planning and recovery by allowing for a better understanding and assessment on how infrastructure in different communities is equally or unequally affected by disasters.