ABSTRACT
Disaster events (flood, heatwave, earthquakes, pandemics, etc.) have a significant impact on the performance of business organisations and on the health and well-being of the communities to which they belong. How organisations prepare for, respond to, and recover from these impacts depends on their vulnerability and resilience to the disaster event. Those organisations that exhibit a low vulnerability and high resilience tend to recover quickly, using the experiences they gain to inform their preparedness and mitigation actions to a future event. Those organisations that exhibit a high vulnerability and low resilience tend to recover more slowly or, in many cases, not to recover at all. This chapter will explore the facilities manager’s role in supporting business organisations as they prepare for and recover from a disaster event through strategic facilities management planning. The chapter presents a Resilience Assessment and Improvement Framework (RAIF) that combines the Disaster Resilience of Place model with strategic built asset management to provide a decision support framework to assess an organisation’s vulnerability and resilience to disaster events. This chapter presents the theories underpinning the RAIF and uses an example to illustrate its application to an earthquake disaster event.
