Developing a resilience index towards natural disasters in Indonesia

Most areas in Indonesia are prone to natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunami and volcano eruptions. In order to minimize the disaster impacts and shorten the recovery period, the resilience of a disaster-prone area is required to be assessed. This paper aims to develop a framework to assess the resilience of disaster-prone areas in Indonesia towards natural disasters, by establishing an index. In the framework, resilience is defined as the ratio between preparedness and vulnerability. The dimensions for preparedness are social, economic, community capacity, institutional and infrastructure. Similar dimensions applied for the vulnerability with additional dimension of hazard, come up with an index that is scaled from 0 to 1. The framework is applied to assess the resilience of Cilacap regency (in Central Java province) and the city of Padang (in West Sumatra province). The results show that both areas are resilient towards natural disasters, although certain improvements still can be made to further increase the resilience of both areas.