The disaster resilience assessment of coastal areas: A method for improving the stakeholders' participation

Increasing frequency, intensity and severity of natural hazards associated to climate change are among the pressing challenges the world is facing requiring greater resilience for communities. This challenge calls for new policies and actions at regional and local level having the concept of resilience as their main driver and core component. However in order to prioriotirise and invest in the resilience building, the actors involved in the governance of a territory and in the implementation of Disaster Risk Reduction measures must first recognize the multifacted nature of resilience and the importance of its measurement. Priorities, resilience meaning and metrics are subject to different interpretations, making resilience a societal complex issue. To this end the paper aims to provide a new method for the incorporation of multilevel stakeholders' view in the assessment of the inherent resilience of a place and in the design of a metric based Resilience Index (RI). The new approach integrates the Disaster Resilience of Place (DROP) model and the use of semi-structured interviews with a standpoint in the Grounded Theory Methodology to facilitate both the assessment of resilience in a quantitative manner and an in-depth analysis of the context. The method has been applied in the framework of coastal exposure to flood, by involving 18 municipalites of the Po River Delta (Italy). The interactions of the, physical and anthropogenic processes in the Po River Delta requires a better understanding in terms of resilince to support sustainable management and spatial planning actions in the context of climate change. The analysis spreads across different administrative boundaries and complex and dynamic natural systems that have recreational, residential and economic functions. The results demonstrate the potentiality of the method to guide different local actors in their disaster resilience strategy and in the identification of priorities.