National Academies Press: OpenBook
« Previous: Appendix B: Public Session Agendas
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Measurement Tools Reviewed." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25383.
×

Appendix C

Measurement Tools Reviewed

  1. Alliance for National and Community Resilience Benchmarking System (http://www.resilientalliance.org). The alliance is coordinated by the International Code Council and was embarking in 2018 on a resilience benchmarking effort for buildings, water, and energy with the intention of creating a “standard, usable, and easily understandable metric” for communities. No benchmark tools have been developed by the alliance to date otherwise.
  2. Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC) (http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/geog/hvri/baseline-resilience-indicators-communities-bric). First published by Cutter, Burton, and Emrich (2010), Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities is a quantitative index of pre-disaster community resilience at the county level designed to compare counties across the United States. Community dimensions included are social and economic capital, ecosystems, infrastructure, and institutional capacity, which are grouped into six indicators at the county level. The first version of the tool covered 49 indicators, culled down from an original 61. BRIC was integrated into a pilot National Risk Index tool by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2017 along with three other related measurement frameworks.
  3. Characteristics of a Disaster Resilient Community (http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1346086/1/1346086.pdf). Twigg (2007) published a preliminary set of resilience characteristics with funding from a variety of British-based philanthropic and developmental aid agencies. The characteristics are organized around five different thematic areas, structured by function (governance, risk assessment, risk management, etc.). It has not been implemented as an analytic or measurement tool to date. The updated version (Twigg, 2009)
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Measurement Tools Reviewed." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25383.
×
  1. adds more practical guidance on methods and applying the resource, based on feedback from field testing.

  2. City Resilience Index (CRI, also referred to as the City Resilience Framework or CRF) (https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/report/city-resilience-index). Produced by Arup in 2014, with support from the-Rockefeller Foundation, the CRI is based on intensive site visits and consultation with resilience literature. The preliminary sets of 52 indicators are categorized into four domains, each with as many as 127 data measures (or sub-indicators). The index is being piloted in several cities as of early 2019.
  3. Climate Resilience Screening Index (CRSI) (https://edg.epa.gov/metadata/catalog/search/resource/details.page?uuid=https://doi.org/10.23719/1393586 and https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi?Dockey=P100SSN6.txt). Produced by the Environmental Protection Agency, the methodology for the CRSI was published in 2017 (Summers et al., 2017). The index is a composite measure composed of five domains (risk, governance, society, built environment, and natural environment), represented by 20 indicators, and calculated from 117 metrics. Scores are calculated at the county level and have been applied only once, with no revision for reliability or validity testing.
  4. Climate Risk and Adaptation Framework and Taxonomy (CRAFT) (http://www.c40.org/programmes/climate-risk-adaptation-framework-andtaxonomy). Under guidance from the Bloomberg Philanthropies and C40, Arup developed a taxonomy of climate change–related hazard risks beginning in 2015 with the expectation of developing a reporting standard for participating C40 cities on adaptation actions and climate risk experiences. This includes a benchmarking process, which primarily serves as a checklist for administrative actions or plans. This reporting standard has not been released publicly as of early 2019.
  5. Coastal Resilience Decision Support System (http://coastalresilience.org). The Nature Conservancy’s coastal resilience program is an approach and a series of geospatial mapping tools that depict a variety of indicators for current environmental conditions and future conditions based on climate change projections, particularly for the Gulf region. Overlaid on these maps are six current socio-economic indicators and the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute’s Social Vulnerability Index. As more than a single resilience measurement, the system’s various mapping applications are descriptive of these various indicators.
  6. Coastal Resilience Index (https://toolkit.climate.gov/tool/coastal-resilience-index). Developed by the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coastal Storms Program in 2010, the index is primarily a structured guidebook for community leaders to self-assess in response to a series of yes/no questions across five physical and social categories. Affirmative responses are tabulated and placed within categories, and a qualitative scale of low to high assigned to
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Measurement Tools Reviewed." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25383.
×
  1. each category. Other versions of the index have been developed for specific infrastructure or economic sectors (like tourism and ports), although these follow a similar guidance and introspection process rather than one based on empirical measurement.

  2. Community Assessment of Resilience Tool (CART) (http://www.start.umd.edu/research-projects/community-assessment-resilience-tool-cart). Developed out of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), CART is a community survey begun by scholars as a method for initiating community resilience building, particularly in the areas of capacity, competence, health, mobilization, and empowerment. Pfefferbaum et al. (2007) identified seven attributes of community resilience based on a workshop held by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Terrorism and Disaster Branch of the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress.
  3. Community Disaster Resilience Index (CDRI) (https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ea56/1b67fb9fa11964a32e99c4da14ad32dd39de.pdf). With funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Texas A&M scholars produced series of indicator sets beginning in 2010 that overlaid multidimensional capitals onto disaster stages, and these were subjected to preliminary reliability and internal and external validity tests. The resulting measurement framework was implemented in U.S. Gulf Coast counties and resulted in a series of scholarly papers and theses. No additional application has been documented to date.
  4. Community Resilience Indicators and National-Level Measures (https://www.fema.gov/community-resilience-indicators). In 2016, the Federal Emergency Management Agency published a draft concept paper produced by an interagency project team co-led by the agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that outlined an approach to measuring community resilience capacity using 28 distinct indicators across 10 “core capacities,” including physical infrastructure themes as well as hazard mitigation activity. The proposed framework was meant to be applicable at both the local and national levels, but no clear further revision or piloting has thus far been released.
  5. Community Resilience Manual (https://www.fema.gov/communityresilience-indicators). In 2000, the Canadian Centre for Community Renewal produced Community Resilience Manual, a guidebook for communities to develop their own diagnostics for community resilience. The manual provides a list of questions for respondents to qualitatively assess the state of the community’s social capital and cohesion (including inclusion and equity concerns), although it makes no reference to infrastructure, environment, or other physical dimensions. No specific applications have been noted.
  6. Community Resilience Planning Guide (https://www.nist.gov/topics/ community-resilience/community-resilience-planning-guide). Released by
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Measurement Tools Reviewed." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25383.
×
  1. the National Institute for Standards and Technology in 2015 with several years of advisory review, the guide is not a measurement tool per se, but a six-step planning process that helps communities develop local resilience plans related to their buildings and infrastructure systems based on the support these provide to the community’s social and economic institutions. The guide does not provide specific recommendations for measurement, but does provide some guidance regarding the subject dimensions.

  2. Community Resilience System (CRS) (http://www.resilientus.org/recent-work/community-resilience-system). The Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) coordinated the creation of the CRS, which originated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2010 by request of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The CRS is a qualitative process of community engagement and prioritization that reviews the knowledge base of community resilience and possible tools and resources, including the CART survey, which relies on seven community capacity and competence attributes in four domains thought to affect community resilience to disasters.
  3. Community Resilience: Conceptual Framework and Measurement (https://www.fsnnetwork.org/community-resilience-conceptual-frameworkand-measurement-feed-future-learning-agenda). The U.S. Agency for International Development commissioned an exploratory work in 2013 to review the state of community resilience measurement and propose sample indicators. The indicators are categorized into assets, social dimensions, and areas of collective action that somewhat mirror the dimensions described in this report but also include institutional resilience activities in addition to the resilient conditions that those activities should, in theory, produce. The resulting framework is less of an attempt at measurement as it is guidance for the agency on indicators of relevance to its interventions in development aid, particularly in relating community resilience to household resilience. It was considered in this assessment because of the level of detail in its indicators.
  4. Community-Based Resilience Analysis (CoBRA) (http://www.undp.org/content/dam/undp/library/Environment and Energy/sustainable land management/CoBRA/CoBRRA_Conceptual_Framework.pdf). The United Nations Development Programme’s Drylands Development Centre developed the CoBRA beginning in 2012 based on observations from a project in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda with the goal of measuring resilience at the community and household levels. The tool has since been field-tested and revised. Its indicators are structured around five capitals that mirror other resilience literature, each of which is given a score tallied across indicator sets. Although the focus is on rural communities in developing contexts (with a sub-focus on food security and infrastructure), the overall structure parallels that of other measurement efforts for community resilience.
  5. Conjoint Community Resilience Assessment Measure (CCRAM) (http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/PREPARED/Pages/ccram.aspx). Begun in 2010 by a group of
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Measurement Tools Reviewed." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25383.
×
  1. Israeli scholars, the CCRAM integrates multidimensional indicators into a measurement instrument for community resilience after a disaster. The tool was subjected to psychometric testing that led to a 10-indicator instrument across the functional areas of leadership, collective efficacy, preparedness, place attachment, and social trust. Among all of the measurement frameworks reviewed for this report, this is the only one to measure indicators after an event.

  2. Disaster Resilience Scorecard. Beginning in 2016, IBM and AECOM collaborated to produce a scorecard composed of 10 “essentials” that evolve around a checklist of activities and plans that communities should undertake to prepare for and reduce their risks to disasters. The activities address a wide range of resilience dimensions, but not as a direct result of measurement. Rather, the scorecard serves primarily as a process guide. The organization reports having utilized the scorecard in several communities via one- or two-day workshops.
  3. Disaster Resilient Scorecard for Cities (https://www.unisdr.org/campaign/resilientcities/home/toolkitblkitem/?id=4). The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction developed the Disaster Resilient Scorecard for Cities in 2014 for cities to establish a baseline measurement of their current level of disaster resilience and identify priorities for investment. The scorecard requires ranking across 85 criteria grouped primarily into a combination of functional capacity measures (planning organization, response and recovery functions, for example) with additional indicators for risk assessment and physical infrastructure and environment. The focus of the scorecard, then, is on the public sector’s operations, and qualitative assessments are scaled (from 0 to 5) and tabulated. The scorecard has been piloted in many cities (all outside the United States) but, because of the subjective data collection and analysis, has not been used to compare across cities. It has not undergone reliability and validity testing.
  4. Earthquake Recovery Model (https://www.spur.org). The San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) published an estimated time frame for recovery of various infrastructure facilities after an earthquake scenario (SPUR, 2008). The estimates are summaries of professional judgment (rather than being based on actual post-disaster recovery data) and are not tied to any specific indicator related to the multiple dimensions of resilience. No further analysis or revision has been conducted since the original publication.
  5. Evaluating Urban Resilience to Climate Change (https://cfpub.epa.gov/ncea/global/recordisplay.cfm?deid=322482). The Environmental Protection Agency produced an urban resilience assessment protocol in 2016, Evaluating Urban Resilience to Climate Change, that incorporated dozens of indicators across eight sectors (with an emphasis on environmental and infrastructure sectors). To overcome challenges in the qualitative indicators,
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Measurement Tools Reviewed." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25383.
×
  1. thresholds were proposed by which communities’ responses could be scaled. The framework was piloted in two communities but has not been revised or fielded further, as of early 2019.

  2. Flood Resilience Measurement Framework (https://www.zurich.com/en/corporate-responsibility/flood-resilience/measuring-flood-resilience). Produced by the insurer, Zurich Insurance Group, in 2014, the Flood Resilience Measurement Framework addresses 88 indicators across five capitals similarly defined as those presented in this report, and tagged by disaster stage, resilience property, and theme. The framework is focused on pre-disaster conditions in relation to flood events only, as opposed to being an overarching resilience measure. Data for the indicators come from household surveys, focus groups, key informant interviews, community meetings, and third party sources. These qualitative data are scaled to tabulate individual scores that are then translated into numeric values per capital. The framework has been pilot-tested in more than 100 communities worldwide (including in two National Academies’ Resilient America Roundtable pilot communities).
  3. Framework for Community Resilience (http://www.ifrc.org/Global/Documents/Secretariat/201501/1284000-Framework%20for%20Community%20Resilience-EN-LR.pdf). The International Federation of the Red Cross produced the Framework for Community Resilience in 2014, an exploratory framework for community resilience that focuses on objectives within a purposeful theory of change, and proposed sample indicators for demonstrating the efficacy of interventions designed around that theory. The indicators and, to a lesser extent, the objectives map onto multiple dimensions of resilience. However, the framework appears to have been a strategy exercise that has not been employed either in a specific community or for a specific intervention.
  4. Indicators of Disaster Risk and Risk Management (http://idbdocs.iadb.org/wsdocs/getdocument.aspx?docnum=35177671). In 2010, the Inter-American Development Bank produced a report suggesting a framework across member nations that mirrors other resilience measurement efforts. However, the proposed four indexes were tabulations across core functional areas: disaster deficit (economic) risk, aggregate local risks, risk management, and vulnerability. These indicators were structured to support investment and prioritization. Beyond the analysis performed for the report, there is no evidence of further revision or application.
  5. National Health Security Preparedness Index (https://nhspi.org/explore-the-index). Originally developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as an exploratory tool to improve the awareness of health security and preparedness, the National Health Security Preparedness Index has since been revised and employed annually across the United States by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation since 2013. In the 2016 version, 134 individual measures were analyzed including a group of 18 measures defined as foundational capabilities. The focus of the indicators is on functional preparedness
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Measurement Tools Reviewed." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25383.
×
  1. of public health entities (a refined mirror to some community resilience measurement’s attempts to capture public-sector capacity).

  2. PEOPLES Framework (http://peoplesresilience.org). First published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2010, the framework represents an aggregate of seven categories of community indicators that provide a theoretical snapshot across multiple dimensions. Though there is no clear operational metric or data collection system proposed, each category suggests a wide range of indicator themes. There is currently no clear use of the framework beyond its serving as helpful guidance for the categories in question.
  3. Resilience Capacity Index (RCI) (http://brr.berkeley.edu/rci). Developed by Foster (2011) and promoted by the research network, Building Resilient Regions, the RCI is a single value for U.S. metropolitan regions that summarizes 12 social and economic indicators given equal weight, with no additional reliability or validity testing. Each indicator as well as the overall index scores are then ranked across the sample of 361 areas. No additional revision or analysis has been produced.
  4. Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis (RIMA) (http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5665e.pdf). In 2010, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization produced a measurement framework for resilience that focused on social service delivery and access. Grounded in food security and developmental aid literature, the tool was applied at the city level for a range of communities undergoing significant service gaps or challenges. The tool was piloted in at least six communities but has not undergone additional revision or fielding.
  5. Resilience Inference Measurement (RIM) (https://www.unisdr.org/campaign/resilientcities/home/toolkitblkitem/?id=11). Another scholarly approach to community resilience measurement (Lam et al., 2016), RIM models attempt to quantify resilience across three “elements” (exposure, damage, and recovery indicators) to denote vulnerability and adaptability. In contrast to other measurement frameworks, the authors of RIM propose a reassessment of core independent variables across multiple dimensions (typically starting with 25 theoretically grounded variables) in every context, thereby limiting generalizability. The model also attributes change in the development variables solely to the selected independent variables, thereby likely omitting other causal explanations.
  6. Resilience Measurement Index (RMI) (http://www.anl.gov/grid/project/resilience-measurement-index-rmi and http://www.ipd.anl.gov/anlpubs/2013/07/76797.pdf). The Infrastructure Assurance Center at Argonne National Laboratory, in partnership with the Protective Security Coordination Division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, developed the RMI to characterize the impact and response resilience of critical infrastructure with respect to all hazards. Released in 2013, the index is intended to
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Measurement Tools Reviewed." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25383.
×
  1. support decision making related to risk management, disaster response, and maintenance of business continuity.

  2. Resilience Scorecard (http://coastalresiliencecenter.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Berke_et_al._best_paper_JAPA_2015.pdf and http://ifsc.tamu.edu/getattachment/News/July-2017/Plan-Integration-for-Resilience-Scorecard-Guideboo/Scorecard-(1).pdf.aspx). Developed by urban planning scholars to project plans’ impacts on a community’s physical and social vulnerability to hazards (Berke et al., 2015), the Resilience Scorecard relies on an index derived from 11 social indicators at the census block group level and two environmental hazard indicators. The scorecard is not meant as measurement of resilience per se, but as an assessment tool for planning districts’ vulnerability gaps.
  3. Resilience United States (ResilUS) (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233714675_ResilUS_A_Community_Based_Disaster_Resilience_Model). ResilUS is a loss-estimation simulator devised by scholars (Miles and Chang, 2007) to project losses (like the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Hazus) and recovery time in communities after disaster scenarios based on existing social, economic, and infrastructure indicators similar to those used in frameworks that measure resilience capacity in pre-disaster and general conditions. Like the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association’s framework, ResilUS is not meant to measure resilience more broadly as defined in past National Academies’ publications; rather, it focuses on the post-disaster recovery time exclusively.
  4. Rural Resilience Index (RRI) (https://rdrp.jibc.ca/rural-resilience-index-rri and http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0002764214550297). The RRI is a qualitative resilience self-assessment process and toolkit devised for rural communities by Canadian scholars (Cox and Hamlen, 2014), designed to address one resilience dimension (social cohesion) and one public function (emergency management). A series of yes/no questions are meant to be answered by citizens, tallied, and scored into a summative index. It has been field tested in a handful of Canadian cities though its ongoing use is unclear.
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Measurement Tools Reviewed." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25383.
×
Page 117
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Measurement Tools Reviewed." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25383.
×
Page 118
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Measurement Tools Reviewed." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25383.
×
Page 119
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Measurement Tools Reviewed." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25383.
×
Page 120
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Measurement Tools Reviewed." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25383.
×
Page 121
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Measurement Tools Reviewed." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25383.
×
Page 122
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Measurement Tools Reviewed." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25383.
×
Page 123
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C: Measurement Tools Reviewed." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25383.
×
Page 124
Next: Appendix D: Communities the Committee Visited »
Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program Get This Book
×
 Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program
Buy Paperback | $60.00 Buy Ebook | $48.99
MyNAP members save 10% online.
Login or Register to save!
Download Free PDF

The frequency and severity of disasters over the last few decades have presented unprecedented challenges for communities across the United States. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed the complexity and breadth of a deadly combination of existing community stressors, aging infrastructure, and a powerful natural hazard. In many ways, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was a turning point for understanding and managing disasters, as well as related plan making and policy formulation. It brought the phrase "community resilience" into the lexicon of disaster management.

Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program summarizes the existing portfolio of relevant or related resilience measurement efforts and notes gaps and challenges associated with them. It describes how some communities build and measure resilience and offers four key actions that communities could take to build and measure their resilience in order to address gaps identified in current community resilience measurement efforts. This report also provides recommendations to the Gulf Research Program to build and measure resilience in the Gulf of Mexico region.

READ FREE ONLINE

  1. ×

    Welcome to OpenBook!

    You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

    Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

    No Thanks Take a Tour »
  2. ×

    Show this book's table of contents, where you can jump to any chapter by name.

    « Back Next »
  3. ×

    ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

    « Back Next »
  4. ×

    Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

    « Back Next »
  5. ×

    Switch between the Original Pages, where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

    « Back Next »
  6. ×

    To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter.

    « Back Next »
  7. ×

    Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

    « Back Next »
  8. ×

    View our suggested citation for this chapter.

    « Back Next »
  9. ×

    Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

    « Back Next »
Stay Connected!