Assessment of Urban Resilience to Natural Disasters with a System Dynamics Tool: Case Study of Latvian Municipality

Research focuses on linking climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction strategies. The aim of the research is to test an urban resilience assessment tool through a local case study. The tool is based on integrating two methods. Multi-criteria analysis and system dynamics model is used to create a dynamic Urban Resilience Index. For the case study a local medium sized town is chosen in Latvia that is subject to flood risk. The results of the model simulation show that the model is suitable for both short term and long term resilience assessment. Future studies must focus on the precision of such a tool, which in this study could not be evaluated. Overall, the tool presented can contribute to offsetting the existing knowledge gaps between climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction for better policy planning and strengthening urban resilience on the local level.