Social and economic vulnerability index development for disasters: An application on cities in Turkey

Increasing number of disasters along with factors such as increasing population, unplanned urbanization and unequal distribution of income, changes on social structure, and many others are resulting with increasing amount of losses in terms of human life, economic and structural damages. At the same time it is known that the amount of damage after a disaster occurrence changes by locality and depends on where exactly the disaster occurs. Underdeveloped regions or countries are subject to more damages comparing to developed regions or countries. The amount of damage might change even from city to city or different parts of a city. These fluctiations on amount of damages for similar disasters prove us that different aspects of vulnerability and vulnerability results should be studied in more detail by different disciplines. There are large amount of studies focusing on physical vulnerability related subjects. Main reasons of disasters damages go beyond physical vulnerability and physical structure. Thus along with physical vulnerability social and economic vulnerabilities should be main focus area too.Main goal of this study is to first propose that physical vulnerability is not the only vulnerability type and thus we must define and study social and economic vulnerabilities for earthquakes. In order to achieve this goal, this study develops an index to measure social and economic vulnerabilities and apply this index to 81 cities in Turkey. Then, it compares and analyzes the results and make suggestions to prevent or reduce damages of disasters before it occurs.This study focuses on two main vulnerabilities as social and economic. In order to develop the index, a detailed literature review has been done to find factors which are affecting social and economic vulnerabilities. Then, some of these factors were eliminated based on their applicability to Turkey. Selected group of experts weighted these factors based on their expeted impacts on social and economic vulnerability index values. After this step, the data were obtained from TUIK and other related organisations and sub index and index values has beeen calculated for each city in Turkey.The result show that social and economic vulnerabilities have a strong relationship with development level of that locality or region. If a disaster occurs in an underdeveloped region, the severity of casualties and losses will be larger. Thus, policy-makers or decision-makers must take necessary actions to consider these social end economic vulnerability index values when they are making decisions about investments, or distribution of resources related to disasters. This study, provided these scores and suggestions for Turkish policy-makers and decision-makers.