Assessing critical infrastructure resilience in terms of its service-providing capacity in coastal Bangladesh: A synthesis of geospatial techniques and social responses

Lack of adequate infrastructure, especially in the coastal regions of developing countries, limits the capacity of households to prevent, cope with, and recover from the adverse effects of natural hazards. The services provided by critical infrastructure (CI) contribute to the overall resilience of marginalized coastal households to natural hazards. CI, in turn, may itself be resilient (or not). Resilient CI is capable of providing services to meet the community's demand for that service. This research developed and tested an innovative framework for assessing CI resilience in terms of services it was capable to provide to coastal residents in three separate phases (before, during, and after) of Cyclone Sidr, using empirical evidence from a coastal sub-district of Bangladesh. The disaster-phase-wise level of demand for these services was identified using GIS-based network analysis combined with community rankings of service importance across the disaster phases. Households were surveyed to determine whether they were able to procure CI services in each phase. A comparison of service demand levels with success in procuring CI services was used to assess CI resilience. The results revealed spatio-temporal variation in the service provision of existing CI units to households in the study area. A mixed trend was indicated: less exposed communities contained a somewhat higher percentage of service-receiving households than more exposed communities during the pre- and post-disaster phases, whereas the percentage was higher in the more exposed communities during the syn-disaster phase. This approach has the potential to determine whether the existing CI in a community is resilient enough to support the population in the different phases of a cyclone. The results could guide planners to bolster CI resilience for communities, thereby also improving community resilience to natural hazards.