Building and Measuring Community Resilience Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program (2019) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
2 Evaluation of Existing Resilience Measurement Efforts
2 Evaluation of Existing Resilience Measurement Efforts
Pages 21-46
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 21... ...
The community resilience movement has made significant advances over the past decade. Initiatives explicitly intended to build resilience have been promoted by organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, and the Z Zurich Foundation; by government agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
|
From page 22... ...
These 33 efforts are meant to represent a diverse sample of currently available community resilience tools and frameworks. The committee sought to examine resilience measurement efforts that specifically purport to assess community resilience or provide guidance to resilience assessment.
|
From page 23... ...
The committee assessed community resilience measurement efforts to describe the current state of scholarship and practice, explicitly examining published efforts that are intended to serve as measurements of community resilience. Of the dozens of resilience measurement efforts considered, the committee selected 33 whose methodological development and operational definitions of resilience are publicly available (see Table 2-1; Appendix C provides a brief description of each effort)
|
From page 24... ...
Community Disaster Resilience Index (CDRI) Texas A&M Community Resilience Indicators and Federal Emergency Management Agency National-Level Measures Community Resilience Manual The Canadian Centre for Community Renewal Community Resilience Planning Guide National Institute for Standards and Technology Community Resilience System (CRS)
|
From page 25... ...
Foster, 2011; OPDR, 2012 Resilience Index Measurement and Analysis United Nations Food and Agriculture (RIMA) Organization Resilience Inference Measurement (RIM)
|
From page 26... ...
In general, resilience measurement efforts are increasingly integrating the multiple dimensions of resilience. And, recently developed efforts that do not consider all of the community capitals -- for example, Argonne National Laboratory's Resilience Measurement Index and NIST's Community Resilience Planning Guide, which focus on the built environment -- acknowledge that there are other components of resilience phenomena and activities that their efforts do not address.
|
From page 27... ...
Relief and response Recovery Long-term community planning or nontemporal Object of analysis Asset-based (Cutter, 2016b; Sherrieb, Norris, and Galea, Capacity-based 2010) Combination of assets and capacities Community unit of analysis Administrative boundaries below municipal (Sirotnik, 1980)
|
From page 28... ...
For example, in the Environmental Protection Agency's Climate Resilience Screening Index, The Nature Conservancy's Coastal Resilience Decision Support System, and Argonne National Laboratory's Resilience Measurement Index, the environmental conditions and projections of critical infrastructure indicators are directly connected to relevant literature in those fields while simultaneously relevant to community resilience. In general, resilience measurement efforts provide an incomplete view of community resilience by assuming that measurement of only one or two of the capitals is the equivalent of measuring overall community resilience -- in other words, they ignore the foundational premise that community resilience is multidimensional (see Figure 2-1)
|
From page 29... ...
. The concept of an adverse event is implicit in all resilience measurement efforts but not necessarily represented explicitly by specific variables or indicators.
|
From page 30... ...
Approximately half of the community resilience measurement efforts reviewed do not specify a specific adverse event type. Of those that do, the largest subset is focused broadly on natural hazards, often related to climate change.
|
From page 31... ...
The community resilience measurement efforts reviewed for this report typically combined both in some fashion, but tended to rely more on asset-based indicators (e.g., Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities and the Zurich Flood Resilience Measurement Framework) because data are more readily available and because the literature on capacity measurement is more nascent.
|
From page 32... ...
The measurement efforts reviewed use a variety of community-level data sources that come from different units of analysis within a community such as parcel boundaries, topographic groups, households, or political districts. Many resilience measurement efforts that have been operationalized define communities using a combination of institutional capacities (e.g., government functions)
|
From page 33... ...
. The measurement efforts reviewed by the committee employed quantitative data, qualitative data, and/or a combination of both.
|
From page 34... ...
Box 2-2 illustrates known procedures and steps for constructing indexes of various types to help researchers understand the inherent limitations and/or biases in their tools. As Box 2-2 indicates, an important methodological step to ensure a robust measurement effort is validity testing, in other words, testing to confirm that the resilience measurement is gauging resilience and not some other characteristic such as sustainability, economic productivity, inclusivity, equity, or vulnerability.
|
From page 35... ...
The committee found few community resilience measurement efforts with documented reliability and validity analyses (though, admittedly, methodological rigor is not always a purposeful intention of their development)
|
From page 36... ...
Many diagnostic measurement efforts are intended to be used for national or state decision making or investment prioritization. While there has been movement toward this purpose -- such as the Federal Emergency Management TABLE 2-3 Characteristics Used to Assess the Use of Current Resilience Measurement Efforts Use Subject Relevant Characteristics Purpose of measurement: Prescriptive Effort's product Descriptive Diagnostic Evaluative Purpose of measurement: Community engagement Effort's process Scholarly inquiry Investment decisions or prioritization Mandate as part of a program or initiative Effort's complexity Resources needed (e.g., knowledge, software, staff)
|
From page 37... ...
Many of the resilience measurement efforts the committee examined have been used in community engagement activities by local governments or civil sector entities. In some cases, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coastal Resilience Index and the NIST Community Resilience Planning Guide, the efforts are intended as community engagement efforts with resilience ostensibly to raise awareness and provide guidance for decision making.
|
From page 38... ...
The committee also evaluated the level of community engagement both in the effort's development and with regard to its communication at a community level, since this has been an underlying motivator for many measurement efforts. Table 2-4 lists the three subject areas that were explored.
|
From page 39... ...
The committee considered the overall rate of production of new resilience measurement efforts and the status of existing ones. The number of resilience measurement efforts continues to grow, but the rate of growth appears to have tapered in recent years, and there have been surprisingly few applied efforts to measure community resilience.
|
From page 40... ...
Some efforts initially designed to be community engagement tools have not been implemented as operationalized measurement efforts. But a few of these have moved to the implementation phase, especially those that rely on qualitative data.
|
From page 41... ...
Both of these measurement activities included data collection and rubrics for measuring resilience. REMAINING GAPS, CHALLENGES, AND OPPORTUNITIES TO IMPROVE MEASUREMENT Based on its review of 33 measurement efforts detailed in Table 2-1 (and Appendix C)
|
From page 42... ...
The framework measures flood resilience through the lens of five community capitals (human, social, physical, natural, and financial) 1 and four prop erties of a resilient system (robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, rapidity)
|
From page 43... ...
• There is a lack of research identifying the most relevant indicators based on capitals, purpose, context, etc., as well as their measurement and aggregation. • There is an extensive reliance among the resilience measurement efforts on secondary data, which limits innovation or creativity in terms of more suitable or more accurate data sets.
|
From page 44... ...
The goals of resilience measurement efforts are sometimes at odds with how they are applied and what they were intended to accomplish. As discussed in later chapters, a few efforts are designed to identify increased investments (such as the NIST Community Resilience Program and Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities)
|
From page 45... ...
The majority of the existing efforts are single-use applications and have not been applied repeatedly in the same place at different points in time, thus making it difficult to gauge a measurement's ability to track changes over time. Without the ability to capture change over time, measurement efforts lose value as decision-making tools.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.