THE IMPACT OF FLOODS ON COMMUNITY RESILIENCE IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

In the recent decade of Singapore’s history, flash floods have shocked the nation, causing hazardous though not life-threatening impacts on the physical assets of the community. Resilience is commonly understood as the ability to bounce back from difficulties. The study of resilience is conventionally done on a nation-wide basis. There is insufficient rigour in research of community resilience, where it is mostly a scaled down version from the national level. Individual communities are unique from one another and each of their respective resilience should be studied as an individual entity. Infrastructural resilience has traditionally been receiving the key attention and focus. There are however many other facets to the concept of resilience. This study attempts to highlight the other aspects of Resilience (Social and Institutional) through the community and experts’ perspectives using interviews on the ground. This study also aims to analyse the community’s resilience as a solution to the problems of flooding, instead of relying solely on infrastructural enhancement alone. Questionnaires and multi-criteria decision analysis will be used to make independent weighted analysis. Analytic Hierarchy Process and Relative Importance Index (RII) are two methods of the multi-variable analysis. The results of the RII will shed light on the community’s perception of the various facets of resilience. Through the questionnaire and RII ranking, the top five sub-attributes were all under Institutional Resilience. Social Resilience was ranked the least important in the eyes of the community. On the surface, the RII rankings correlate with the common perception – that the intangible concept of social resilience is deemed as fuzzy and unrealistic when compared against the physical infrastructure and pragmatic institutional governance. It is concluded that the aspect of social resilience should be studied by itself. A comparative analysis with other aspects of resilience does not do social resilience justice for it is found to have much potential to further enhance overall community resilience.