Human‐Centric Disaster Resilience: Uncovering Social Inequity in Climate Change

Understanding community disaster resilience is critical to mitigating the disproportionate impacts of climate change and natural disasters on socially vulnerable populations. However, despite extensive discussion on disaster resilience, a systematic analysis of the extent of social inequity across climate scenarios, geographic locations, spatial scales, and sociodemographic groups remains underexplored. Our study introduces a human-centric framework to investigate social inequities in community disaster resilience related to human well-being. We combined flood hazard maps under both historical and future SSP scenarios with a compound multilayer urban spatial network model consisting of roads, communities, and essential services to evaluate the residents' service resilience during flood events. Then, we utilized the Gini coefficient and Lorenz curve to quantify the degree of inequities in resilience among different sub-populations. With Central Chongqing as a case study, our analysis reveals a significant increase in both the number of affected communities and their vulnerability under future climate conditions. We further observed a striking spatial polarization in community resilience due to the islanding effect, whereby communities are increasingly divided into those with severely limited service availability and those with sufficient resources. In addition, we found that the extent of social inequity in resilience is highly spatial and scale-specific, with moderate levels of inequity at the city level, but the degree of inequity varies greatly across sociodemographic groups at a localized level. This widening socio-spatial differentiation may trigger widespread dissatisfaction in disadvantaged communities, hindering the collective disaster response actions and engagements to enhance community resilience. Our research highlights the importance of embedding future climate variabilities, human well-being, and social equity in inclusive disaster response policies, processes, and practices.