5 September 2025—Resilience is a term often discussed in the face of a natural disaster such as a major earthquake, but the attributes of resilience and how they interact are rarely analyzed, researchers say in a new study published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.
To learn more about resilience, Hsiang-Chieh Lee of the National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction and colleagues analyzed the response of local governments to two major earthquakes in Taiwan in 2016 and 2018.
Their paper in BSSA is part of a special issue of the journal on learning from the past to prepare for future earthquake hazards, 25 years after the 1999 magnitude 7.6 Chi-Chi earthquake in Taiwan.
The study by Lee and colleagues identified 13 attributes of resilience, such as agility (the ability to respond quickly to unexpected events) and diversity (the response that uses varied solutions and technologies to reduce the risk of systemic failures), foresight capacity, modularity, and redundancy, among others.
What’s more, the researchers show that specific attributes become key within certain phases of a critical disaster. Agility is the overarching attribute important in both the response and preparedness phases, while attributes such as resourcefulness are most important in the preparedness phase.
The attributes of creativity and connectivity become most important during the response phase, said Lee. “This is because when pre-existing preparedness measures prove insufficient, a resilient response heavily relies on the on-the-spot creativity and the ability to connect with necessary resources to implement these novel solutions.”
“However, our findings also serve as a crucial reminder: all attributes discussed in the paper are linked to preparedness,” Lee added. “This underscores that while resilience often seems like a measure of improvisation, true resilience is fundamentally built on proactive, pre-disaster preparation.”
The study looked at the response to the 2016 magnitude 6.6 Tainan earthquake, which included the highest number of casualties from a single damaged building in Taiwanese history. The 2018 magnitude 6.2 Hualien earthquake, which also caused several deaths and significant infrastructure damage, occurred exactly two years after the Tainan event. The researchers drew data from interviews with key people who responded to the earthquakes as well as secondary sources such as government reports and news articles.
“Importantly, both disasters showcased numerous examples of public-private collaboration,” Lee explained. “Because no other major earthquakes occurred between them, we were able to clearly analyze whether lessons from the 2016 event influenced the response in 2018. This allowed us to specifically study the transfer of experience and collaboration, which are central themes in our discussion of resilience.”
The study highlights how the public and private sectors can contribute differently to earthquake resilience, Lee noted.
“The public sector typically takes the lead in the preparedness phase, as it is mandated with the authority to do so. In the response phase, however, when public sector resourcefulness is unable to cope with the situation, the diversity, creativity and networks brought in by the private sector become critically important,” said Lee.
The researchers say their resiliency framework should be applicable to other disaster types such as wildfires or floods, and they plan to share their findings widely with local governments.
They are writing an accessible guidebook to share their research with all 22 of Taiwan’s municipalities, along with universities and non-governmental organizations, Lee said.