Disaster Resilience of Children in Hazard Prone Areas: A Case Study of Peshawar, Pakistan

Abstract

Even though children are the least resilient to disasters, they are mostly ignored in disaster research and policymaking. This study assesses the institutional performance in the context of children disaster risk management and also proposes a Multidimensional Children Disaster Resilience Assessment Framework by considering the social, economic, physical, institutional, and psychological dimensions. To quantitatively measure the psychological dimension, a Children Psychological Disaster Resilience Assessment Framework was devised by incorporating four components namely- mental health, life stressor, attitude, and awareness. A household questionnaire survey, with children as primary respondents, in the presence of their parents, was conducted in four communities of Peshawar, Pakistan. The selected areas had different urban and rural characteristics, planned and unplanned developmental characteristics, and were exposed to flood and earthquake hazards. The proposed framework was validated by constructing the Multidimensional Children Disaster Resilience Index. The result shows significant variations amongst all the five dimensions of resilience among the four areas. It is evident that children's disaster resilience does not explicitly depend on the characteristics of children themselves, but more accurately, it is an amalgamation of - on one hand - social, economic, institutional, physical, and psychological dimensions, and - on the other hand - the characteristics of an individual child, household, community, and urban and regional characteristics. Furthermore, a Performance scale was devised that shows average institutional performance, representing need for improvement in institutional performance especially in disaster mitigation. The proposed framework highlights the perspectives on children's disaster resilience. It also emphasizes the need for disaster resilience from household to regional level in an integrated and holistic manner. The framework and the methodology have the potential to assist in quantifying children's resilience and identify precise dimensions that can be enhanced through appropriate disaster risk reduction strategies.