Urban and Rural Hawaiʻi Communities Value Resilience Assets Differently, Survey Finds

A survey of roughly 300 residents on the Hawaiian island of Oʻahu has revealed sharp differences in how urban and rural communities perceive the assets that underpin their resilience to climate-related disasters. The study, published in Frontiers of Urban and Rural Planning, compared Oʻahu’s densely built Primary Urban Center, home to about 400,000 people, with the rural district of Koʻolauloa, which has around 20,000 residents and no designated emergency shelters. Using a customized Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) framework, researchers Cuong Tran and Suwan Shen found that urban respondents reported greater access to infrastructure-oriented physical assets, while rural respondents consistently assigned higher importance to physical, human, and social assets across all resilience dimensions.

The researchers framed their work around a pressing local reality. Island communities like Hawaiʻi face rising sea levels, intensifying tropical storms, and extreme flooding and heat, and their geographic isolation complicates the transport of emergency supplies from the continents. According to planning documents cited in the study, disaster response can be unpredictable and time-consuming, and communities may need to rely on their own resources and networks for days to even weeks before external aid arrives. The effectiveness of that local resilience depends largely on the availability of community assets that support disaster preparedness, response, and recovery.

The study focused on three asset types defined in prior community development literature: physical capital such as roads, buildings, infrastructure, and natural resources; human capital encompassing residents’ skills, leadership abilities, and knowledge; and social capital, the formal and informal relationships that bind communities together. The authors evaluated these assets against four core resilience elements identified in earlier research: community networks and relationships, teamwork and leadership, information and communications, and training and education. Resilience itself was defined locally, drawing on the Ola Oʻahu Resilience Strategy’s framing as the ability to survive, adapt, and thrive regardless of what shocks or stresses come.

Data collection took place as part of ongoing community efforts to plan resilience hubs. Two online community workshops were held in Summer 2021 with Neighborhood Board members to pilot-test the survey, and the finalized questionnaire was distributed through board members, city council members, local leaders, and government agencies via email and social media. The anonymous online survey remained open for a month, from September to October 2021. Participants identified their community’s existing assets from a provided list and then ranked each asset’s importance for the four resilience elements on a Likert scale ranging from “Not at all Important” to “Extremely Important.” They also completed pairwise comparison questions judging the relative importance of asset types in neighborhood adaptation.

In total, 218 surveys were collected from the Primary Urban Center and 86 from Koʻolauloa. The analysis combined two-sample Z-tests for proportions, comparing asset availability across the two areas with 20 tests at a 95 percent confidence level, and eight two-way ANOVA tests examining how perceived importance varied by asset type and geographic context across the four resilience elements. Likert-scale responses were treated as quasi-interval data, scored from 1 to 5, an approach the authors note is common in social science research when comparing group perceptions.

The availability results showed a clear urban advantage in infrastructure. Urban residents reported significantly higher availability of community spaces (96.8 percent versus 87.2 percent), public attractions (76.6 percent versus 57.1 percent), and mass transit hubs (49.5 percent versus 17.4 percent). Rural residents reported slightly higher percentages for medical facilities, cultural features, and non-government buildings, but those differences were not statistically significant. For human assets, rural respondents reported significantly higher availability across every category, including farming and gardening expertise (74.4 percent versus 38.5 percent) and knowledge of Native Hawaiian practices (64.0 percent versus 17.9 percent). Rural respondents also reported significantly stronger informal social networks, including information sharing among households, physical and emotional support among neighbors, frequent neighborhood event organization, and connections with community-based organizations.

The ANOVA results reinforced the pattern in perceived importance. For community networks and relationships, the main effects of asset type and geographic context were both highly significant, with rural communities rating assets at a mean of 4.06 versus 3.62 for urban communities, and social assets rated most important overall. For information and communications, rural respondents again rated all asset types more highly, with social assets ranked first in both settings. For teamwork and leadership, rural respondents emphasized human assets most, while urban respondents ranked social assets highest. Training and education showed a notable crossover: urban respondents associated it most strongly with human assets, whereas rural respondents rated physical assets such as facilities and infrastructure highest. At the subcategory level, the largest urban-rural gaps involved medical facilities, farming and gardening knowledge, Native Hawaiian practices, and manual labor skills, all rated much higher in rural areas, while mass transit hubs were the only asset rated significantly higher in urban areas for teamwork and leadership.

The authors interpret these patterns as differences in perceived reliance on community assets. In rural areas, limited access to formal services and infrastructure may increase dependence on locally embedded resources, which residents therefore recognize as essential. In urban areas, abundant physical infrastructure may lead to greater dependence on formal systems, with widely available resources more likely to be taken for granted. Interestingly, when respondents ranked the overall importance of the three asset types, no statistically significant urban-rural differences emerged, but descriptive patterns suggested communities may place greater value on asset types they perceive as lacking locally.

The findings carry direct implications for resilience hub planning, an emerging strategy the authors describe as flexible, community-centered facilities serving everyday needs while functioning as critical support nodes during disasters. In urban areas, where physical infrastructure is abundant but human and social assets may be underutilized, hubs located in schools, libraries, or government facilities could host regular gatherings, training programs, and preparedness activities that build social ties over time. In rural communities, which already exhibit strong human and social assets but face gaps in physical infrastructure, hubs may work best when embedded within familiar community spaces such as community centers or cultural facilities, adding reliable energy, communication technologies, storage, or emergency supplies rather than creating entirely new institutions.

The study has important limitations the authors acknowledge. The online-only survey design may have excluded residents with limited digital access and could introduce selection bias, and the sample is not intended to be fully representative of the broader population, so findings should be read as indicative patterns in perceived asset importance rather than precise population-level estimates. Elderly residents were overrepresented in the sample, and the analysis measures perceived importance rather than actual resilience capacity or system performance during hazard events. The authors also note that the study did not directly evaluate resilience hubs, and further research is needed to assess generalizability across other Pacific Island and global contexts. Even so, the work demonstrates how an asset-based lens can reveal that resilience depends not only on what a community has, but on how its members perceive, prioritize, and mobilize what they already possess.

Subject of Research: Comparing urban and rural perceptions of community assets for climate resilience in Hawaiʻi

Article Title: Enhancing climate resilience in island communities: comparing urban and rural resilience using an asset-based approach in Hawaiʻi

Article References: Tran, C., & Shen, S. (2026). Enhancing climate resilience in island communities: comparing urban and rural resilience using an asset-based approach in Hawaiʻi. Frontiers of Urban and Rural Planning, 4(1), Article 10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44243-026-00081-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44243-026-00081-w

Keywords: climate resilience, Hawaiʻi, Oʻahu, asset-based community development, urban-rural comparison, community assets, resilience hubs, disaster preparedness, social capital, survey research, island communities, planning