Resilience Indicators

Indicators and indicator systems are perceived as important instruments to assess, measure and evaluate resilience. Current research activities focus on developing reliable indicators that apply at different scales and policy realms and address different types of shocks and perspectives of resilience. This deliverable aims to contribute to the research activities by integrating results from latest literature on resilience indicators (state-of-the-art) and the findings obtained from the emBRACE project. We therefore focus on community resilience to natural hazards and rely to a great extent on the conceptual approach and the five case studies within emBRACE. We reveal the potentials and advantages of indicator-based approaches for assessing community resilience and present indicators that enable transferring theoretical and conceptual considerations into specific applications. At the same time, we underline the challenges and limitations of such approaches considering in particular the conceptual understanding of resilience and case study approaches within emBRACE.

Source Document: Daniel Becker, Stefan Schneiderbauer, John Forrester, Lydia Pedoth, With contributions from: José M Rodríguez-Llanes, Hugh Deeming. 24-06-2015. Guidelines for development of indicators, indicator systems and provider challenges. Deliverable 3.5

Summary

This report discusses indicators and indicator systems of community resilience by taking into account current research activities and findings obtained from the emBRACE project. We propose to use an integrated approach for assessing community resilience by means of indicators, considering multiple level of measurements, scales and perspectives of community resilience. The emBRACE conceptual framework and the empirical grounded indicators of the emBRACE case studies allow us to derive key-indicators of community resilience that can be applied across different contexts and types of natural hazards.

The deliverable is composed of one main report and one additional policy brief. The main report is intended for scientists, who work in applied research as well as practitioners with academic background and/or academic interest. It comprises three main parts. The first part deals with conceptual and theoretical aspects of resilience indicators and summarises current research activities in this field. The second part describes the procedure within emBRACE of developing the ‘emBRACE indicators’ and presents the selected ‘key-indicators’ of community resilience (chapter 3). The last part outlines major challenges of indicator use in practice by pointing out important steps of indicator development and application, as well as typical challenges and potential pitfalls. The shorter ‘policy brief’ is designed for policy makers and advisors and aims at supporting the decision-making process within communities for assessing resilience by means of indicators. The policy brief provides a quick overview of what the full report has to offer including practical considerations on resilience indicators, a guideline summary and a collection of key-indicators.