The landscape of disaster resilience indicators in the USA

The landscape of disaster resilience indicators is littered with wide range of tools, scorecards, indices that purport to measure disaster resilience in some manner. This paper examines the existing qualitative and quantitative approaches to resilience assessment in order to delineate common concept...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Natural hazards (Dordrecht) Vol. 80; no. 2; pp. 741 - 758
Main Author: Cutter, Susan L.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.01.2016
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Assessments
Case studies
Civil Engineering
Communities
Community support
Disaster relief
Disasters
Earth and Environmental Science
Earth Sciences
Economics
Environmental Management
Geophysics/Geodesy
Geotechnical Engineering & Applied Earth Sciences
Hydrogeology
Indicators
Landscapes
Natural Hazards
Orientation
Original Paper
Resilience
United States > US
USA
Disaster resilience indicators
USA
Measuring community resilience
ISSN:0921-030X, 1573-0840
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The landscape of disaster resilience indicators is littered with wide range of tools, scorecards, indices that purport to measure disaster resilience in some manner. This paper examines the existing qualitative and quantitative approaches to resilience assessment in order to delineate common concepts and variables. Twenty seven different resilience assessment tools, indices, and scorecards were examined. Four different parameters were used to distinguish between them—focus (on assets baseline conditions); spatial orientation (local to global), methodology (top down or bottom up), and domain area (characteristics to capacities). There is no dominant approach across these characteristics. In a more detailed procedure, fourteen empirically based case studies were examined that had actually implemented one of the aforementioned tools, indices, or scorecards to look for overlaps in both concepts measured and variables. The most common elements in all the assessment approaches can be divided into attributes and assets (economic, social, environmental, infrastructure) and capacities (social capital, community functions, connectivity, and planning). The greatest variable overlap in the case studies is with specific measures of social capital based on religious affiliation and civic organizations, and for health access (measured by the number of physicians). Based on the analysis a core set of attributes/assets, capacities, and proxy measures are presented as a path forward, recognizing that new data may be required to adequately measure many of the dimensions of community disaster resilience.
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ISSN:0921-030X
1573-0840
DOI:10.1007/s11069-015-1993-2