Towards a Geospatial Household Natural Hazard Resilience Model in Rwanda.

Household resilience to natural hazards is a critical issue facing society with the advent of climate change. In this work, we developed one of the first household natural hazard resilience geospatial models for Rwanda designed to understand household resilience at detailed spatial resolutions. We evaluated indicators within the model through empirical field work using an easy to deploy survey on Android tablets. To the best of our knowledge, the work presented here is innovative as it some of the first work to use geospatial technology-based surveys to conduct household-level natural disaster resilience surveys in Rwanda. Select results presented in this paper indicated that household vulnerabilities and subsequent resilience generally matched with existing district-level risk mapping of Rwanda. However, our work went beyond existing risk mapping to understand individual household perceptions of resilience. Respondents generally reported a mix of positive and negative drivers of household resilience. General security and economic situation was perceived as very insecure, healthcare and education were very secure, and utilities, food and water, and housing were generally perceived as insecure but not as insecure as economic situation and security. There is much more that can be understood in terms of household resilience as it relates to many factors of household resiliency in our model including physical vulnerabilities, financial capacity, information access, technological capacity, and most importantly, resilience perceptions.