Regional resilience after a disaster is a process that encompasses resistance, recovery and redevelopment. However, there have been few longitudinal dynamic analyses using resilience indicators after a disaster. This research proposes an ordination and clustering-based method for regional resilience evaluations focused on short-term disaster-resistance and long-term disaster-recovery capacities in the affected counties. This method was proven to be effective on data from 55 counties before and after the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake (2005-2016) in Sichuan Province, China. It was found that: (i) economic related indicators were often negatively affected by the disaster over the short term, especially in the severely affected counties; (ii) the degree of economic development and the devastation extent significantly affected the recovery trends of two macro-economic indicators: the primary industry and the private economy; and (iii) the recovery trends in most counties for some economic and social indicators were initially stagnant or had a slow recovery for 1-3 years, after which there was a rapid recovery process. The intuitive and informative results from this evaluation provide a better understanding of the dynamic regional resilience process after a disaster.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.