An integrated approach to characterizing infrastructure socio-physical impact of hazards to guide mitigation efforts in a community

Legitimate impact evaluation in a community is a precursor to shed light on mitigation measures and resilience improvement in response to frequently increasing and intensifying hazards. However, prevalent hazard impact assessment in a community usually assesses the degradations of the structural or functional performance of infrastructure systems with limited concentration on their induced societal impacts during hazard events. And the inaccurate characterization of socio-physical impacts contributes to the myopic and incomplete impact mitigation and resilience improvement policymaking. This paper, to fill this gap, proposes an integrated socio-physical impact evaluation model to guide the mitigation efforts and improve resilience in a community, theoretically endorsed by both efficiency-focused and equity-oriented values. The model is composed of three modules: (i) modeling infrastructure operating regime and hazard-induced physical impact by harnessing physics-based approach; (ii) assessing the societal impact due to infrastructure service interruption using socio-based approach; (iii) trade-off analysis of socio-physical impact and the integrated evaluation to guide mitigation efforts using multi-criteria decision-making method. A demonstrative case in Wanchai District, Hong Kong is used to testify the validity of the proposed model. The strength of the model lies in that it achieves a trade-off between physical and societal impacts, which are consolidated to inform unified resilience improvement in a community compared to other methods. It is envisioned that the integrated socio-physical evaluation model can provide actionable insights for the formulation of hazard-specific preparedness strategies. © 2026 Elsevier Ltd.