Establishing Disaster Resilience Indicators for Tan-sui River Basin in Taiwan

A major trend in disaster management is to build resilience for sustainable development. Resilience is defined as the ability which may be learned from previous disaster experiences to make the system more stable than before through absorbing and adapting the changes caused by the disaster. In this paper, enhancing disaster resilience in a river basin is studied and regarded as an important operation process to achieve sustainability of urban area. The measurement of disaster resilience can be used as a potential environmental disaster diagnosis of previous urban planning policy strategies, and is a required foundation for drafting future spatial and urban planning policies. This paper proposes an application that combines fuzzy Delphi and analytic network process techniques in order to establish a set of disaster resilience indicators for a re-developed urban area in Tan-sui River Basin (Taiwan). By incorporating expert opinion, a priority index is calculated for each studied disaster resilience indicator. And, an enhanced resilience indicator evaluation methodology, which reflects interdependencies among evaluation dimensions using an integrated approach, is suggested in this paper. The results show that the main influences on satisfaction are: (1) factors of the management institute of basin, (2) financial capability, (3) conservation of water resource, (4) environmentally sensitive area, and (5) conservation of slope area. Overall, these main influences (five resilience indicators) show future directions for sustainable development in Tan-sui River Basin.