A community resilience index for place-based actionable metrics

Area of Science:

• Environmental Science
• Disaster Risk Reduction
• Community Planning

Background:

• Community resilience measurement is crucial for natural hazard preparedness in the US.
• Federal and state programs increasingly focus on enhancing community resilience.
• Existing metrics may not fully capture locally specific and modifiable resilience indicators.

Purpose of the Study:

• To co-produce an actionable resilience metric for South Carolina.
• To compare "actionable" metrics with "conventional" Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC) at county and tract scales.
• To identify locally relevant and modifiable indicators of community resilience.

Main Methods:

• Developed a methodology to co-produce actionable resilience metrics based on the BRIC index.
• Calculated actionable BRIC metrics at county and tract scales.
• Compared actionable BRIC metrics with conventional BRIC metrics using reliability testing and correlation analysis.

Main Results:

• Actionable BRIC metrics demonstrated superior reliability compared to conventional BRIC.
• Actionable BRIC metrics showed a stronger correlation between scales than conventional BRIC.
• Mapping revealed distinct low resilience regions between actionable and conventional BRIC, indicating differences in captured resilience drivers.

Conclusions:

• Actionable BRIC metrics, particularly at the tract level, offer a more accurate representation of modifiable resilience in South Carolina.
• The study highlights the importance of integrating top-down and bottom-up approaches for effective resilience measurement.
• The developed methodology is replicable in other regions for creating actionable, locally relevant resilience metrics.