Resilience and extreme events: Example on nursing home flood evacuation in Taiwan

In the recent years, resilience has become a fashion term in studies of disaster. Yet this growing literature rarely addresses some important issues e.g. differences between resilience and other concepts (such as capability, vulnerability etc.), important factors of resilience, methods to measure or enhance resilience etc. Among the studies, Boin, Comfort and Demchak clearly define resilience as society’s capacity to respond to unusual emergencies, especially those low-chance and high-impact episodes. Since preplanned social systems are usually designed for high-chance events, they tend to fail during extreme events. Resilience, rather than preplanned social system, keeps society from disintegration after an extreme event.

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