Enhancing quantitative approaches for assessing community resilience

Abstract

Scholars from many different intellectual disciplines have attempted to measure, estimate, or quantify resilience. However, there is growing concern that lack of clarity on the operationalization of the concept will limit its application. In this paper, we discuss the theory, research development and quantitative approaches in ecological and community resilience. Upon noting the lack of methods that quantify the complexities of the linked human and natural aspects of community resilience, we identify several promising approaches within the ecological resilience tradition that may be useful in filling these gaps. Further, we discuss the challenges for consolidating these approaches into a more integrated perspective for managing social-ecological systems.

A Framework to Evaluate Community Resilience to Urban Floods: A Case Study in Three Communities

“…Sustainability 2020, 12,1521 3 of 20 scientific guidance for risk management of and strategic decisions for urban floods at the community scale.…”

“…Resilience is widely recognized as the ability of a system to respond to and recover from disasters and to absorb the impacts as well as cope with an event [11]. Community resilience is the capacity of a community to resist disasters and to take alleviating actions that are consistent with achieving the expected level of protection [12]. If a community can respond and recover from a hazard event and return to normal quickly, with good preparedness to reduce disaster losses rather than waiting for an event to occur [13], it is recognized as having a high resilience level.…”

Selecting Indicators for Assessing Community Sustainable Resilience

“…Key components needed to make resilience assessment more accessible and meaningful to communities lie in efforts focused on creating greater consistency in defining and identifying what to measure (Cutter, 2016;Cutter et al, 2014;Johansen et al, 2016;Sharifi, 2016), as well as efforts to better integrate social and physical system impacts, and develop improved methods for measuring them within a community setting (Chuang et al, 2018;Koliou et al, 2018). Although these issues are inherently linked to the context of the system for which a resilience assessment is being performed, there are similarities across systems with the same general structure that require a consistent approach to identification and facilitation of indicator selection.…”

Incorporating Social System Dynamics in the Columbia River Basin: Food-Energy-Water Resilience and Sustainability Modeling in the Yakima River Basin

“…In socio-ecological and other interdisciplinary research, resilience refers to the ability of systems to resist or adapt to changes or shocks and persist, or to move into an alternative, possibly more desirable state (Folke, 2006;Olsson et al, 2015). Addressing conceptual variations in understandings of resilience, and subsequent differences in operationalization and measurement, is a first step in incorporating the social into FEW nexus resilience research (Chuang et al, 2018).…”