Developing a resilience index towards natural disasters in Indonesia Ratih Dyah Kusumastuti n , Viverita, Zaafri Ananto Husodo, Lenny Suardi, Dwi Nastiti Danarsari Department of Management, Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Indonesia UI Campus, Depok 16424, Indonesia article info Article history: Received 29 June 2014 Received in revised form 17 October 2014 Accepted 17 October 2014 Available online 23 October 2014 Keywords: Resilience Natural disaster Indonesia abstract Most areas in Indonesia are prone to natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tsunami and volcano eruptions. In order to minimize the disaster impacts and shorten the recovery period, the resilience of a disaster-prone area is required to be assessed. This paper aims to develop a framework to assess the resilience of disaster-prone areas in Indonesia towards natural disasters, by establishing an index. In the framework, resilience is defined as the ratio between preparedness and vulnerability. The dimensions for preparedness are social, economic, community capacity, institutional and infrastructure. Similar dimensions ap- plied for the vulnerability with additional dimension of hazard, come up with an index that is scaled from 0 to 1. The framework is applied to assess the resilience of Cilacap regency (in Central Java province) and the city of Padang (in West Sumatra province). The results show that both areas are resilient towards natural disasters, although certain improvements still can be made to further increase the resilience of both areas. & 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Indonesia is considered as one of the disaster-prone countries. The country is located at the intersection of three crucial earth faults: the Pacific fault, Indo‐Australian fault, and Eurasian fault. As a result, the country has to face with frequent and powerful seismic activity, such as earthquake and volcano eruption, and other types of natural disasters, e.g. tsunami, typhoon, and drought. According to The Indonesian National Agency for Disaster Management (BNPB), there were 12,494 disasters in the period of 2002–2012 with 190,087 numbers of casualties [1]. Natural disasters have significant impacts to many aspects of life of the residents in the affected areas, and the recovery from such a tremendous event can take a considerable amount of time. Considering the significant impact of natural disaster, it is important to determine the level of disaster risk in a country's area. A deep understanding of the matter will help government to develop a comprehensive framework or policy to minimize the negative impact of disasters. In addition, understanding risk level should also be followed up by the as- sessment of resilience level toward the disasters. As mentioned by Mayunga [2], disaster resilience is the capacity or ability of a community to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and recover quickly from impacts of disaster. Furthermore, disaster resilience along with economic vitality, environmental quality, social and inter-generational equity, quality of life, and participatory process are the six principles of sustainability [3]. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijdrr International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2014.10.007 2212-4209/& 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. n Corresponding author. E-mail address: ratih.dyah@ui.ac.id (R.D. Kusumastuti). International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 10 (2014) 327–340