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The concepts of sustainable development and resilience are sometimes used interchangeably (Farsi et al., 2017; Hosseinian-Far & Jahankhani, 2015), and have routes in disaster management as a subject area. The concept of resilience refers to the ability of a system to sustain its operation when affected by external forces. The same concept applies within the context of resilience to disasters. After the disastrous Tsunami that hit the Indian Ocean region in December 2004 (Suppasri et al., 2015), there has been an increased sensitization in recent years on the likely damaging impacts of tsunamis (Older, 2015) and several life-threatening natural events (Stephan et al., 2017). Communities along the coastal lines are the most vulnerable to naturally induced disaster situations (Mallick et al., 2017) partly due to climate change (Aliagha et al., 2015) and some unnatural causes resulting from human activities on their environment (Noy, 2015). However, research in the area of disaster management is becoming intensified, as global development agencies are focused on formulating relief frameworks and actions (Managi and Guan, 2017) to prevent the adverse impact of natural disasters (Witvorapong et al., 2015).
Intriguingly, over the past decade, there have been a rise in the number of natural disasters across the world (Cassar et al., 2017). Figures released by the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) in 2018 indicates a 62.9% increase in global disaster rates, with death tolls margin around 84.3% (Auzzir et al., 2018) resulting to economic damage of about 120% in the same year (Lahai and Lahai, 2019). An average of 32.3 million people around the world was displaced by disasters associated with weather or climate changes (Hossain, 2015).
Statistics from 2012 showed that the global disaster levels rose by approximately 2.4% against the preceding year (Jeppesen et al., 2015), this was majorly attributed to weather-related events (Kelman et al., 2016). The mortality index ratio for people residing in high-risk disaster-prone regions has also increased in recent times (Wong et al., 2016). Finding between the late ’80s and a decade of a millennium confirms that in Canada, there was at least 41.9% known incidents of floods and 31.8% resulting from wildfire (Townshend et al., 2015). However, incorporating a modern approach to managing disaster and it's after effect poses a huge concern to stakeholders across the world (Ferraro and George, 2016). The adverse impact of global warming and climate change (Johnson et al., 2018) on the ecosystem further stresses the demand for the adoption of preventive measures to alleviate future catastrophes (Cutter et al., 2013; Shao, 2016; Hosseinian-Far et al., 2011; Hosseinian-Far et al., 2010).
Over the years, several natural events have resulted in individuals and communities being exposed and prone to disaster situations (Alfred et al., 2015; Ostadtaghizadeh et al., 2016; Linnenluecke and McKnight, 2017). This level of vulnerability which has a been widely researched area examines the extent of susceptibility of a defined group, society or community (Bergstrand et al., 2015; Gil‐Rivas and Kilmer, 2016) to natural disasters (Maikhuri et al., 2017; Kang and Skidmore, 2018) and accessing their response framework (Himes-Cornell et al., 2018; Serfilippi and Ramnath, 2018).