Seeking commonalities of community resilience to natural hazards: A cluster analysis approach

ABSTRACT

The aim of the study on which the article is based was to identify groups of communities with similar resilience profiles, using Norwegian municipalities as a case. The authors used a set of socioeconomic and environmental indicators as measures of municipalities’ resilience and performed a cluster analysis to divide the municipalities into groups with similar multivariate resilience signatures. The results revealed six groups of municipalities that, apart from their unique combinations of indicator scores, featured certain spatial patterns, such as an “urban cluster” with urbanized municipalities and a “suburban cluster” with municipalities concentrated around major cities. The authors conclude that municipalities in each of the groups shared aspects that made them either more or less resilient to natural hazards, which could make them potential targets for shared interventions. Additionally, the authors conclude that clustering can be used to identify municipalities with similar resilience features and that could benefit from networking and sharing operational planning as a way to improve their respective communities' resilience to natural hazards.

KEYWORDS:

• cluster analysis
• community capacities
• indicators
• Norway
• resilience measurement

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the editors for inviting excellent referees and to the referees for providing thoughtful comments on earlier versions of the article. We also thank the members of the ClimRes project team (Gunhild Setten, Haakon Lein, Silje Aurora Andresen, and Aleksi Räsänen) as well as Ivar Holand and Per Arne Stavnås for useful discussions on the relevance of the selected indicators. Additionally, we thank the participants of a departmental seminar in which the early steps and the preliminary outcomes of the cluster analysis were presented. Last but not least, we are grateful to Catriona Turner for language editing and for providing us with valuable suggestions on our article.

Notes

1 All reverse-scaled variables are marked with an asterisk in Table 1.

2 In Norway, an urban settlement can comprise as few as 60–70 buildings inhabited by at least 200 persons if the distance between the buildings does not exceed 50 m, although exceptions may apply (Statistics Norway 2020).

3 We used data from the Norwegian Mapping Authority to calculate the shares of clusters of Norway’s entire territory and data from Statistics Norway to calculate the shares of population.

4 ACCIDENTS is a reverse-scaled indicator serving as a proxy measure of road safety. A high (low) score on this indicator relates to a low (high) average number of traffic accidents per 1,000 persons.

5 All Norwegian municipalities are required to perform a risk and vulnerability analysis (risiko- og sårbarhetsanalyse, ROS).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the project “Climate change, and natural hazards: The geography of community resilience in Norway” (ClimRes), funded by the Research Council of Norway’s KLIMAFORSK program (Grant number NRC 235490). It was also supported by the Research Council of Norway's funding for research stays abroad (Grant number NRC 250028).