Conceptualizing holistic community resilience to climate events: Foundation for a climate resilience screening index

Abstract

The concept of resilience has been evolving over the past decade as a way to address the current and future challenges nations, states, and cities face from a changing climate. Understanding how the environment (natural and built), climate event risk, societal interactions, and governance reflect community resilience for adaptive management is critical for envisioning urban and natural environments that can persist through extreme weather events and longer‐term shifts in climate. To be successful, this interaction of these five domains must result in maintaining quality of life and ensuring equal access to the benefits or the protection from harm for all segments of the population. An exhaustive literature review of climate resilience approaches was conducted examining the two primary elements of resilience—vulnerability and recoverability. The results of this review were examined to determine if any existing frameworks addressed the above five major areas in an integrated manner. While some aspects of a resilience model were available for existing sources, no comprehensive approach was available. A new conceptual model for resilience to climate events is proposed that incorporates some available structures and addresses these five domains at a national, regional, state, and county spatial scale for a variety of climate‐induced events ranging from superstorms to droughts and their concomitant events such as wildfires, floods, and pest invasions. This conceptual model will be developed in a manner that will permit comparisons among governance units (e.g., counties) and permit an examination of best reliance practices.

Regionalizing Resilience to Acute Meteorological Events: Comparison of Regions in the U.S.

“…Figure 1 depicts the final CRSI conceptual framework including the domains and indicators of the index. A summary and discussion of the domains, indicators and types of metrics used in CRSI can be found in Summers et al (2017bSummers et al ( , 2018 and are listed in Table 1. All domains for each county, parish and borough (all referred to as county below) were min-max standardized on a scale from 0.01 to 0.99.…”

“…The national results of CRSI have been provided elsewhere (Summers et al, 2017b(Summers et al, , 2018 as well as a regionalization providing direct utility to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-a regionalization by EPA Regions (the U.S. is divided into 10 EPA regions). However, such a regionalization is of limited utility to non-EPA decision makers.…”

RAF Resilience Assessment Framework—A Tool to Support Cities’ Action Planning

“…As referred to in [3], following the World Economic Forum 2014, by 2050, exposure of city dwellers to various hazards, including earthquakes, tsunamis, urban floods, cyclones and storm surges, is expected to double. These challenges require an integrated and forward-looking approach to resilient [15] City Resilience Framework 156 [13] UNDRR Disaster Resilience Scorecard for cities 47 preliminaries 117 detailed [8,9] City Resilience Index to Sea Level Rise 13 [18] Climate Disaster Resilience Index 120 [19] Climate Disaster Resilience Index 82 [20] Climate Resilience Screening Index 117 [16] Flood Resilience Index 91 [21] Resilience Factor Index 17 [22] Community disaster resilience 26 [23] • The services within the RAF scope are those comprised in the urban water cycle, water supply, wastewater and storm water and those having interconnections and interdependencies, closely related with the water services: waste management, electrical energy supply and mobility.…”

Impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Coastal Systems of Southern Louisiana

“…The second type of research is largely narrative-based, conceptually developing a framework and indices to measure resilience to natural hazards or climate events. For example, Summers et al (2017) presented a conceptual model that characterizes resilience to climate events from the natural environment, society, the built environment and risk domains. Such approaches use indicators (metrics) to establish a quantifiable baseline condition for comparing the degree of resilience to monitor progress.…”