If a major earthquake struck the Cascadia coast tomorrow, understanding what your community needs to protect first would be far harder during the disaster than with preparation beforehand. Disaster planning, typically, starts by asking where the hazard is. This research asks a different question: What matters to the people who live there?

This question is at the heart of the paper, “Community asset identification for natural hazards research: A view from the Pacific Northwest,” from Team 3 hub researchers led by Andrea Mah, a postdoctoral scholar at Oregon State University and member of the Cascadia CoPes Hub. The authorship team included members of the hub across institutions: Kailin Sepp, Clara Riggio, and Laurie Richmond (CalPoly Humboldt); Michael Howard (UO); Jenna Tilt, Emma Gleeman, Joshua Blockstein, and Najiba Rashid (OSU); and Ann Bostrom and Dan Abramson (UW).

The paper provides an overview of methodology to best identify and study assets in an emergency preparedness and hazard mitigation context. Understanding what is counted as a community asset, and who gets to decide, has implications for how risk is understood and how mitigation resources are prioritized by the community. By drawing on case studies from the Pacific Northwest Coast conducted by Hub researchers, the authors summarize a range of approaches for identifying assets and explore the strengths, limitations, and equity implications of each.

Community asset research typically takes a strengths-oriented approach. Rather than focusing only on what a community lacks, researchers can ask what resources and capabilities already exist and how those resources contribute to preparedness, response, and recovery. Throughout this study, researchers establish that there are no universally appropriate methods for identifying community assets; this is due to how different approaches make different kinds of knowledge visible.

Researchers shared examples of participatory mapping, interviews/focus groups, surveys, photovoice, walking tours, and drone-based photovoice methodologies. These approaches reveal different types of assets, ranging from physical places and infrastructure to social networks, trusted organizations, cultural resources, and community knowledge. The takeaway was that the methodology shapes what researchers are capable of seeing.

The study also emphasizes how asset identification is not a neutral process. Who gets to define community assets influences what is recognized as valuable and what gets protected. This has important implications for recognitional, procedural, and distributive equity. The authors describe how different methods have the potential to advance these different forms of equity, for example, including diverse community perspectives can help ensure that marginalized or overlooked assets are represented in hazard planning and that mitigation resources are allocated more equitably.

Overall, the research suggests that the process of identifying community assets may be just as important as the asset inventory itself. Community asset research can create opportunities for residents, researchers, and planners to build relationships, exchange knowledge, identify overlooked resources, and develop a more complete understanding of what allows a community to be resilient from natural disasters.

When asked how this study improves the understanding of hazard mitigation and the understanding of risk along the Cascadia Subduction Zone, researcher Andrea Mah had the following to say;

“Using assets-focused approaches can help empower communities to recognize existing strengths and help researchers and planners understand what is valued in the community. Researchers can work with communities to identify important assets and use that information to inform emergency planning, response, and recovery.”

For more information, see here.