Measuring environmental resilience using Q-methods: a Malaysian perspective
Authors
Tariq, HishamPathirage, Chaminda
Fernando, Terrence
Sulaiman, Noralfishah
Nazir, Umber
Abdul Latib, Siti Kursiah Kamalia
Masram, Haidaliza
Issue Date
2022-11-09
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Communities increasingly need tools that can help them assess the environmental risks they face to understand better their capacities in mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Environmental resilience (ER) is a crucial feature of community resilience that is not adequately covered in the literature. This paper proposes an inclusive, participatory approach to achieve stakeholder engagement on the definitions, objectives, and indicators for measuring ER at the community level. This study uses a 5-step approach utilising Q-methods to contextualise a resilience index for Environmental Resilience (ER). An initial set of 57 indicators from 13 frameworks from the literature was reduced to 25 by combining the indicators of similar type, format and terminology. A total of 10 participants from two groups (academics and practitioners) took part in the interviews and Q-sort workshops in Malaysia in this study. Both stakeholder groups identified Ecosystem monitoring as one of the most critical indicators to understand ER, closely followed by rapid damage assessments and an effective communication system. The exercise also revealed marked differences between them regarding the importance of fair access to basic needs and services for citizens, a priority for academics, and the value of building green infrastructure, a priority for practitioners, with the most significant difference between the two groups on the importance of measuring the natural defences of a community. The Environmental Resilience Capacity Assessment Tool (ER-CAT), proposed in this paper, can be used by local governments and communities for engagement, discussion and consensus building to select the resilience indicators that are most relevant to them in their contexts.Citation
Tariq H, Pathirage C, Fernando T, Sulaiman N, Nazir U, Abdul Latib SKK, Masram H. (2022) Measuring Environmental Resilience Using Q-Methods: A Malaysian Perspective. Sustainability, 14(22):14749. https://doi.org/10.3390/su142214749Publisher
MDPIJournal
SustainabilityAdditional Links
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/22/14749Type
Journal articleLanguage
enDescription
© 2022 The Authors. Published by MDPI. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.3390/su142214749ISSN
2071-1050EISSN
2071-1050Sponsors
The authors express their gratitude to the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) for the financial support under the International Grant, EP/PO28543/1, entitled “A Collaborative Multi-Agency Platform for Building Resilient Communities” for the work reported in this paper. This work was also supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) under the Grant ES/T003219/1 entitled “Technology Enhanced Stakeholder Collaboration for Supporting Risk-Sensitive Sustainable Urban Development”.ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.3390/su142214749
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/