A community resilience index for place-based actionable metrics.

Abstract

Community resilience measurement to natural hazards is becoming increasingly relevant due to the growth of federal programs and local and state resilience offices in the United States. This study introduces a methodology to co-produce an actionable resilience metric to measure locally relevant and modifiable indicators of community resilience for the state of South Carolina. The "actionable" metrics, based on the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC) index, are calculated at the county and tract scale and then compared to "conventional" versions of BRIC. Actionable BRICs perform better in reliability testing than conventional BRICs. Correlations across the two scales of BRIC construction show a stronger relationship between the actionable BRICs than conventional, though all are highly correlated. When mapped, actionable BRIC shows a shifted region of low resilience in the state when compared to conventional BRIC, suggesting that actionable and conventional BRICs are distinct. Scale differences show dissimilar drivers of resilience, with county-level resilience driven by community, social, and environmental resilience and tract-level resilience driven by social and institutional resilience. Actionable tract-level BRIC appears to be the best representation of modifiable resilience for South Carolina, but it comes with trade-offs, including calculation complexity and changing geographies over time. Regardless of scale, the resulting actionable indices offer a useful tracking mechanism for the state resilience office and highlight the importance of integrating top-down and bottom-up resilience perspectives to consider local drivers of resilience. The resulting methodology can be replicated in other states and localities to produce actionable and locally relevant resilience metrics.