Assessing Urban‐rural Climate Resilience of Metropolitan Yangon, Myanmar

Globally, communities are constantly responding and coping with risks due to climate and land‐use land‐cover change. In Southeast Asia, impacts from these changes are evident in hydro‐meteorological hazards that are projected to increase in anomaly, frequency and magnitude. In response to these risks, the concept of climate‐community resilience is widely applied in research and policy‐making. Although previous studies have adopted index‐based approaches, an over‐simplified urban‐rural dichotomy is perpetuated in visualization and disaster governance. This study thus aims to uncover how the geographic dynamics of urban‐rural resilience can be assessed and represented as a continuous, uneven and active process. With drought as the hazard of concern, this study models resilience along the urban‐rural continuum in Yangon, Myanmar. The results show that resilience is not dichotomous in form. Areas of high resilience are mostly located along boundaries of contiguous administrative towns, rather than abiding by the physical landscape morphology. It also depends on the intrinsic fabric of a community, that is, its degree of urbanism and ruralness. The study supports the usage of continuous representation in future resilience assessments for relatively urbanized and urbanizing regions. It encourages the conceptualization of disaster governance that considers the decentralization of resilient systems.