Methodology for system level vulnerability

Various index construction approaches are developed to measure the inherent resilience of a household, community, or system (Aksha & Emrich 2020; Mavhura & Manyena 2018; Schipper & Langston 2015). The approach primarily reflects the objective of measurement, the scope of the work, and geographic variations, among other factors. Based on the resilience measurement literature and guided by Howard et al. (2021), a novel methodology is proposed to benchmark climate-resilient WASH systems, which encompasses five domains:  i) Community capital, ii) Environment, iii) Infrastructure, iv) Institutional support and governance, v) WASH system management. First, relevant resilience indicators were identified and then survey questionnaires were developed to deploy for the data collection and each domain’s resilience score was calculated. Then a composite score of ‘Resilience’ was calculated for each system using the equation below.

Resilience = Σ (Community capital + Environment + Infrastructure + Institutional support and governance + WASH system management)

The steps involved in assessing the resiliency of the WASH systems using the developed framework:  

1. Indicator development for each domain
2. Survey questions
3. Data collection 
4. Analysis

References:

Aksha, S. K., & Emrich, C. T. (2020). Benchmarking community disaster resilience in Nepal. International journal of environmental research and public health, 17(6), 1985.

Howard, G., Nijhawan, A., Flint, A., Baidya, M., Pregnolato, M., Ghimire, A., Poudel, M., Lo, E., Sharma, S., Mengustu, B. and Ayele, D.M. (2021). The how tough is WASH framework for assessing the climate resilience of water and sanitation. NPJ Clean Water, 4(1), p.39.

Mavhura, E., & Manyena, B. (2018). Spatial quantification of community resilience in contexts where quantitative data are scarce: The case of Muzarabani district in Zimbabwe. Geo: Geography and Environment, 5(2), e00065.

Schipper, E. L. F., & Langston, L. (2015). A comparative overview of resilience measurement frameworks. Analyzing Indicators and Approaches; Overseas Development Institute: London, UK, 422.