State of the research in community resilience: progress and challenges

Abstract

Community resilience has been addressed across multiple disciplines including environmental sciences, engineering, sociology, psychology, and economics. Interest in community resilience gained momentum following several key natural and human-caused hazards in the United States and worldwide. To date, a comprehensive community resilience model that encompasses the performance of all the physical and socio-economic components from immediate impact through the recovery phase of a natural disaster has not been available. This paper summarizes a literature review of previous community resilience studies with a focus on natural hazards, which includes primarily models of individual infrastructure systems, their interdependencies, and community economic and social systems. A series of national and international initiatives aimed at community resilience are also summarized in this study. This paper suggests extensions of existing modeling methodologies aimed at developing an improved, integrated understanding of resilience that can be used by policy-makers in preparation for future events.

Selecting Indicators for Assessing Community Sustainable Resilience

“…However, many indicator sets are poorly balanced in terms of representing critical facets and distribution of social, economic, and environmental capital needed to maintain a community. Reviews are consistent in noting lack of representation of indicators related to natural systems with greater emphasis being placed on built systems or social systems (Sharifi, ), as well as weak integration of physical, social, and economic indicators and metrics (Koliou et al., ). Community resilience assessments use similar approaches for identification and selection of indicators to those described above for vulnerability and sustainability (Burton, ; Keck & Sakdapolrak, ; Mayunga, ; Sherrieb et al, ; Sherrieb, Norris, & Galea, ).…”

“…Resilience is an evolving concept, continuing to grow in both theory and application since its original use in ecological sciences to describe a system's ability to "absorb changes of state variables, driving variables, and parameters, and still persist" (Holling, 1973). The need to better understand and evaluate complex system performance in the presence of risk and the consequences of hazards or disruptive events (natural or manmade) has contributed to a diverse body of literature that includes the fields of engineering, social science, psychology, economics, disaster mitigation, and urban planning (Hosseini, Barker, & Ramirez-Marquez, 2016;Koliou et al, 2018). Resilience is often applied as an assessment framework in the presence of disturbance (typically identified through a form of risk assessment), where emphasis is placed on system response and recovery processes for infrastructure systems and communities (Baroud, Barker, & Ramirez-Marquez, 2014;Lam, Reams, Li, Li, & Mata, 2015;Linkov, Trump, & Keisler, 2018;Tierney & Bruneau, 2007).…”

“…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.…”

“…Review of community-based resilience assessment indicators and metrics reveals an abundance of indicators, rendering identification and selection of appropriate measures a difficult and likely confusing task for researchers and practitioners (Cutter, 2016;Koliou et al, 2018;Sharifi, 2016). This work builds upon current literature (Johansen et al, 2016) to offer a nonduplicative set of community resilience indicators with associated quantitative and qualitative metrics that can be used by any community type.…”

“…Reviews of indicators for community resilience have been conducted in recent literature (Asadzadeh, Kötter, Salehi, & Birkmann, 2017;Cutter, 2016;Hosseini et al, 2016;Johansen et al, 2016;Koliou et al, 2018;Larkin et al, 2015;Lu & Stead, 2013;Sharifi, 2016), revealing an abundance of proposed indicators (Cutter, 2016;Sharifi, 2016). Resilience indicators are focused on enabling communities to assess how well they are able to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disaster (natural or manmade), and as such, should include the concepts of risk, vulnerability, sustainability, and adaptive capacity (Gillespie-Marthaler et al, 2018;Nelson et al, 2019).…”