Developing an assessment framework to enhance community resilience to pluvial floods in the UAE

Al nuaimi, MKMA

Abstract

Over the last two decades, the increase in natural disasters has affected communities around the world through significant loss of life and negative environmental and economic impacts. Although communities cannot always prevent these disasters, they can mitigate their consequences by adopting several disaster management strategies, including improving community resilience, which refers to a community's capacity to withstand and cope with disasters. In recent years, enhancing community resilience to disasters becoming one of the most supported approaches to disaster risk management. Due to its geographical location and environmental conditions, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has experienced an increase in natural hazards, including pluvial floods. In fact, pluvial floods have become a global concern as they cause a serious threat to lives and livelihoods. They are difficult to predict, less well known by communities, and happen due to heavy rains in a short time, resulting in difficulties in managing them effectively. The UAE has recognised the importance of implementing and adopting appropriate measures to mitigate the potential effects of these hazards. Therefore, due to the lack of assessment tools and published evidence on community flood resilience, this research aims to develop an assessment framework to enhance community resilience to pluvial floods in the UAE.
To achieve this aim, the research adopts a case study strategy with an exploratory sequential mixed-methods approach, and it is structured into four phases for data collection and analysis. In the first phase, qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior managers (n=12) from related government organisations with rich knowledge and experience in the field of emergency management to investigate and identify key factors that influence community flood resilience through using content analysis based on four main dimensions of resilience: physical, institutional, social and economic. The second phase was employed the questionnaire survey completed by government officials (n=82) at different management levels to analyse the identified factors and obtain respondents’ consensus on their relevance to assess community resilience to pluvial floods. In the third phase, the proposed framework was developed by using an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to determine each factor’s level of importance based on experts’ opinions (n=10) by using pair-wise comparisons as the method of judgement, so that weights of factors were determined and organised into the developed framework. The last phase included the validation stage of the Community Resilience to Pluvial Floods (CRPF) framework by employing a focus group method with seven senior managers to verify its relevance, implementation and adaptation in the UAE context. The findings of this research indicate that the CRPF framework, which consists of four resilience dimensions and 20 key factors, can be used as an assessment tool for stakeholders, particularly for government organisations, helping to enhance community resilience to pluvial floods. This framework provides an important step towards building more resilient communities through the development of measures, policies and regulations for effective management of pluvial floods hazards in the UAE and surrounding regions.

Citation

Al nuaimi, M. (2021). Developing an assessment framework to enhance community resilience to pluvial floods in the UAE. (Thesis). University of Salford

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Deposit Date: May 12, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: May 10, 2024
• Award Date: Apr 9, 2021