Area Business Continuity Management Approach to Build Sustainable Communities

From previous experiences, it was suggested that stakeholders should collaborate in each phase of disaster risk reduction, in order to prevent and mitigate the impact of wide area natural disasters. However, in several cases, the collaboration was not fruitful, owing to the diverse visions of both, private and public organizations’ operational continuity, resulting in conflicts occurring effortlessly among the organizations. One of the solutions to overcome this challenge is applying the business continuity management (BCM) method, such as business impact analysis (BIA) and risk assessment, to the area. Japan International Cooperation Agency reported the “Area BCM” concept in 2013. This paper further investigates the concept of “Area BCM” and introduces the idea to decompose BIA factors for area and individual purposes, in order to build sustainable local economies.