Untapped capacity of place-based peer-to-peer resource sharing for community resilience

Abstract

During and after a disaster, people share resources with family, friends and neighbors to tide them over difficult times. The conventional top-down approach for disaster relief overlooks the wealth of critical resources that exist within communities. Here we explicitly model place-based peer-to-peer (P2P) resource sharing and evaluate its impact on community resilience to disasters. Using data from two urban communities in Seattle, Washington State, we confirm substantial untapped capacity for enhanced community resilience through place-based P2P resource sharing. Under a 5-day isolation scenario, place-based P2P sharing can reduce a community’s resilience loss by 13.4–100%; on average, 22–44 social ties per household support an 80% sharing rate of surplus resources. These findings suggest that place-based P2P sharing could be a viable strategy for disaster response across US communities, in addition to the current, government-led effort. Our methodological framework is transferable to other urban communities interested in enhancing disaster resilience. Using two socioeconomically different neighborhoods in Seattle, this study shows that place-based peer-to-peer resource sharing can substantially improve community resilience in both types of neighborhoods. Strong ties were about 1.5–3 times as effective as weak ties, and the neighborhood with lower socioeconomic status (SES) required more ties to achieve an optimal sharing rate than the neighborhood with higher SES.