Does tourism matter in measuring community resilience?

Highlights

• A tourism community resilience measurement model was proposed.

• The proposed model showed 88.06% accuracy in the validation set.

• The tourism dimension played a significant role in measuring community resilience.

• Key tourism industries positively related to community resilience were proposed.

• Regional hot spots of community resilience and tourism industries were identified.

Abstract

As damage from natural hazards is increasing, quantifying community resilience is a top priority in enhancing communities' ability to prepare for and recover from disasters. This study examines the significance of tourism in measuring community resilience by proposing a tourism community resilience measurement model. To identify key tourism industries that significantly improve community resilience, this study also explores the spatially heterogeneous associations between the validated community resilience metric and tourism industry specialization across 67 counties in Florida. The results indicate that the tourism dimension is important in measuring community resilience and that specific tourism sectors, including amusements and spectator sports, are positively associated with community resilience. These findings can help community policymakers develop localized resilience enhancement strategies by considering tourism.

Introduction

Communities worldwide face increasing risks from multiple natural hazards (Opdyke et al., 2017). As such disasters tragically affect the sustainability of communities, including their socioeconomic and environmental functions, researchers and policymakers have tried to enhance communities' ability to quickly overcome disasters (Norris et al., 2008). Within a socioecological system, the capability of a community to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters while mitigating future impacts is called community resilience to disasters (“community resilience”) (Cutter et al., 2014; Lam et al., 2015). The concept of community resilience not only reflects a recovery step after disasters but also includes a series of processes before, during, and after disasters, leading to sustainable community development (Lam et al., 2016). To effectively manage community resilience and to precisely gauge the success of disaster risk reduction, quantifying community resilience has been recognized as a top priority for policymakers and researchers (Cutter & Derakhshan, 2020; Lam et al., 2016).

There have been steady developments in studies measuring community resilience, especially those studies that have predominantly been conducted in the fields of environmental science and geography (Cai et al., 2018). Researchers have focused on developing measurement frameworks (Lam et al., 2015) and community composite indicators (Cutter et al., 2010; Powell et al., 2018) to accurately measure community resilience. Prior studies have also examined the key determinants that significantly affect community resilience, such as residents' risk perceptions (Powell et al., 2018) and social learning (McEwen et al., 2017).

Despite these efforts, community resilience measurement studies have faced two main issues: (a) a lack of measurement models that consider the tourism dimension and (b) validation. First, to date, little attention has been given to the role of tourism in measuring community resilience and the relevant impact of tourism industries on community resilience. Tourism is highly associated with socioecological elements, which significantly affect the degree of resilience (Ruiz-Ballesteros, 2011). Tsai et al. (2016) showed that tourism can enhance community resilience by building the capacity of communities to undertake an adaptive response to natural hazards. Recent studies have also proven that tourism demand is positively related to community resilience as demand leads to economic growth, which is one of the main factors in building community resilience (Mazzola et al., 2019; Romão, 2020). Although prior studies have shown that tourism is positively related to community resilience, tourism has barely been considered a key measurement factor, and there has also been a lack of research on what types of tourism industries are significantly related to community resilience.

Second, prior studies have struggled to empirically validate the resilience indices that have been derived (Cutter & Derakhshan, 2020). The validation of community resilience metrics is an important stage for justifying the indicators used in the measurement model that may be sufficient and reliable for deriving metrics (Burton, 2015). Cutter et al.'s (2010) Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC) metric has been recognized as a representative community resilience metric for comprehensively considering community dimensions, such as community capital and socioeconomic status, but the metric has a limitation with regard to undertaking validation. Without validation, it is difficult to justify resilience indices as determinants to support effective disaster management decision-making (Cai et al., 2018). Although Lam et al. (2015) recently found a validation method for resilience indices, more attention is needed to derive a validated community resilience metric that comprehensively reflects both disaster and community characteristics.

To fill these research gaps, this study attempts to adapt a validated community resilience metric that considers tourism demand as one of the main factors, and the study also applies a spatial model to identify key tourism industries that are positively associated with the validated community resilience metric across 67 counties in Florida. To achieve this purpose, a tourism community resilience measurement model is proposed and implemented via a case study of five major types of natural hazards (i.e., floods, hurricanes, storms, tornados, and wildfires) between 2010 and 2017 in Florida (Florida Division of Emergency Management, n.d.). As Florida regularly experiences natural hazards and is one of the world's top tourist destinations (Lee et al., 2020), localized and accurate community resilience metrics are needed for Florida to continuously prosper after a disaster. The findings of this study have several implications for community resilience researchers and tourism policymakers, allowing them to consider tourism demand in measuring community resilience and to utilize certain tourism industries in developing community resilience improvement strategies while considering the geographical context.