Co-designing a just resilience balance scorecard with experts in islands and coastal cities

Abstract

The growing focus on enhancing resilience in international humanitarian communities and vulnerable regions underscores the need for advancing theoretical and empirical tools. This research introduces a balance scorecard co-developed with users to monitor justice in disaster risk reduction and resilience (DR3) with a specific emphasis on floods, droughts and heatwaves. The goal is facilitating the integration of risk reduction, climate adaptation, and sustainability into development planning across various locations. The participatory design of the balance scorecard engages 71 stakeholders in vulnerable emerging market economies in the Global South. We take a nexus approach towards critically linked resources (water, energy, land, food, materials), global agendas (Climate Change Adaptation, Sustainable Development Goals and Sendai Framework), vulnerability factors (hazard, exposure and capabilities) and environmental justice dimensions (distribution, participation, capabilities and recognition). Stakeholders confirm the findings from literature that disaster risk governance tends to be more responsive than preventive. The research contributes by introducing temporal dimensions into the balance scorecard, covering anticipation, assessment, prevention, preparedness, response and recovery. This enhances the granularity of pre-emergency phases in risk management, enabling a dynamic analysis of justice considerations given the unique challenges faced by different communities at each stage of the risk management cycle.