Community Resilience Assessment and Identification of Barriers in the Context of Population Aging: A Case Study of Changchun City, China

Abstract

As a susceptible demographic, elderly individuals are more prone to risks during sudden disasters. With the exacerbation of aging, new challenges arise for urban disaster reduction and prevention. To address this, the key is to establish a community-scale resilience assessment framework based on the aging background and to summarize factors that influence the resilience level of communities. This approach is a crucial step towards seeking urban disaster prevention and reduction from the bottom up, and serves as an important link to enhance the capacity of urban disaster reduction. This paper explores community resilience evaluation indicators under the background of aging, builds a community resilience evaluation index system based on the Pressure–State–Response, uses the entropy weight method to weigh the indicators, and carries out a resilience evaluation of 507 communities in the main urban area of Changchun. The empirical results indicate significant spatial differentiation of community resilience in the main urban area of Changchun. Moreover, the regional development is unbalanced, showing a spatial distribution pattern of weakness in the middle and strength in the periphery. The ring road network highlights the difference between the new and old urban areas. The high contribution indexes of community resilience in the main urban area of Changchun were concentrated on disaster relief materials input, community self-rescue ability, and disaster cognition ability. Finally, strategies to improve community resilience are proposed from the perspectives of stress, state, and response, emphasizing community residents’ participation, conducting disaster prevention and reduction training, and improving community response-ability.