The Resilient Community: Strengthening People-Centered Disaster Risk Reduction in the Merapi Volcano Community, Java, Indonesia

Abstract

Local communities generally play a crucial role during a disaster, so their involvement in pre-disaster capacity development may prove beneficial in the face of a disaster threat. Thus, People-Centered Disaster Risk Reduction (PCDRR) programs could enable communities living in disaster-prone areas to become more resilient. This study examines how relationships among individual attributes of the community (and their pre-event Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) context (risk knowledge, information access, and network and stakeholders) could give insight into how communities can be transformed to make them more resilient in the case of the Merapi Volcano community. Based on data collected through online survey platform by non-probability sampling, this study uses non-parametric goodness fit tests and parametric regression to assess the dependencies between various indicators and find the predictor variables. The findings indicate that the individual attributes of the Merapi Volcano community, as perceived through the pre-event DRR context has led to a better understanding of the function of people exposure to prepare more people-centered preparedness and disaster mitigation. However, since the sub-variables did not show any significance for being predictors, this implies that, even though there is a significant reliance between the pre-event DRR context and the individual attributes, the individual attribute could be regarded more as a modifier than a predictor.