Narrow Results

This paper is focused on a practice that has been widely noted in South Asia, i.e. employing extra-local methods to assess community resilience with no or minimal attempts on localising. The objective of this paper is to assess the consistency/inconsistency and concordance/discordance of resilience levels computed by different extra-local assessment methods with reference to a Sri Lankan case. Community resilience levels were computed for 40 localities with three methods utilising secondary data. Statistical analysis revealed neither strong correlation ($r\ge 0.574$), ($p<0.01$) or strong reliability (ICC $=0.481$) among the computed resilience levels, indicating inconsistency and discordance. The findings explained how the randomly selected extra-local assessment methods could produce different values. Hence, can the resilience building decisions based on such assessment methods also be inconsistent? This study suggests decision makers should revisit the practice of employing non-localised extra-local assessment methods without addressing the context-specific resilience building needs profoundly.

Water is essential for all creatures on the earth and the Water Environment Carrying Capacity (WECC) is a critical factor that extensively influences the pace and the scale of economic and society development. The preconditions and the foundation to protect water environment and utilize water resource include: Developing a WECC info system, analyzing the features of each factor and the interrelations among them, revealing the mechanism and condition of water environment sustainable carrying capacity, and implementing an accurate WECC assessment are. In this paper, the basic theory and the research background of WECC are firstly introduced, followed by the review and investigation on the state of the art assessment methods of WECC. Based on the systematic analysis on the features of various methods, the existing problems are proposed, and some suggestions for the further study in this area are given by the authors.