Joan Pauline Talubo
My research project
Assessing island socio-ecological resilience for disaster risk and recovery planning in the Philippines
This PhD research aims to assess the disaster resilience of an island community using a socio-ecological perspective. It will be done by means of a case-study in the Philippines. The research will be conducted in Batanes, a small island province located in the northernmost part of the country. It is composed of ten islands but only three of these are inhabited by people.
Focusing on this specific small island province, the PhD research will integrate the different factors that affect its disaster resilience. It will look at the social, economic and ecological indicators. An indicator-based framework shall be established and a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies shall be employed.
The methodology will consist of a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods including participatory approaches (soft systems), survey and interviews, statistical analysis, multi-criteria decision analysis and geographic information systems. Scenarios will be developed and these shall be evaluated through stakeholder analysis and participatory systems mapping. Ground validation will also be conducted to ensure that the findings will be applicable to the needs of the community. Using this scientific framework, the end users (communities or agencies) can decide what the best option for a particular location is, considering the aggregate of factors.
Supervisors
In the media
My publications
Publications
Despite the existence of a wide range of literature on indicators of disaster resilience in various geographical contexts that have been developed by different agencies and academia, not much has been done to include the insights of practitioners at the local level. This paper seeks to address the lack of practitioner insight and perspective by proposing a mixed methodology in developing composite indicators for the resilience of an island community to disasters. We used a combination of participatory approaches, such as semi-structured interviews with key informants, the web-based Delphi method, and expert interviews through a case study site in the Philippines— the Batanes island province. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was utilized to analyse the data from web-Delphi, and the results from the content analysis of the interviews were used to support these findings. From a broad list of 144 indicators, the process identified 22 composite indicators for assessing the disaster resilience of an island community. We conclude that the development of new approaches for assessing disaster resilience of island communities is a positive step towards a better understanding and operationalization of the concept of resilience. The process followed in this paper is a significant milestone in developing new approaches to answer the question of what makes an island community resilient to disasters.