Conference paper coauthored by Luis Luna-Reyes and presented at HICSS Conference. Full paper is available at https://hdl.handle.net/10125/106634

Communities –such as neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, factories and other organizations—play a crucial role in enhancing disaster prevention, mitigation, and response capabilities within a larger administrative unit (district, borough, town, etc.). In this paper, we call these larger administrative units Grassroots Disaster Reduction Systems. Community resilience is regarded as a new approach for disaster reduction, preparedness, and emergency recovery. Therefore, identifying the influencing factors of community resilience is highly necessary. Using survey data from community members in the Jinwan district in Zhuhai City in China, we develop a Structural Equation Model to identify key factors of community resilience. The results show that infrastructure, demographic capital, and community capital are main promoters of community resilience. Other factors enhancing community resilience include the availability of infrastructure, emergency training, experience in disaster reduction, health protection, mutual assistance and support among community residents, residents’ sense of happiness and mutual trust. External community factors have also a positive impact on community resilience, but the impact is relatively lower. Government’s promotion of emergency knowledge and medical knowledge has the highest impact on community resilience. Information & communication, Community capital, Infrastructure, Institutions & management, Economic development and Risk perception are verified to be the key factors of community resilience, which are positively correlated with community resilience performance.