A critical review on measurement tools of urban household and community resilience to disasters and environmental shocks and stressors among low- and middle-income countries: Theory, application, and guidance

Abstract

With increasingly severe weather events compounded with additional disasters, environmental shocks and stressors, and socio-economic challenges, there is a growing sense of urgency to build resilience, resulting in the need for assessment tools. We conducted a review of empirical studies that measured household and community resilience to environmental shocks and stressors among urban populations in low- and middle-income countries. This review was conducted to 1) understand how empirical studies measure resilience, 2) identify gaps in current practices, and 3) provide theory-informed recommendations to bridge gaps. Our review included 28 studies of which 25 measured community level resilience and three measured household-level resilience. The studies measured resilience against climate change, disease outbreaks, earthquakes, floods, food insecurity, and disasters. The 751 extracted measures from these studies focused on social (45 %), environmental (34 %), and economic (21 %) domains of resilience. Our review revealed that assessment tools often erroneously use measures of vulnerability (example: age distribution, frequency of shocks/stressor) to assess resilience and sub-domains are inconsistently used to characterize resilience across existing measures. Furthermore, capacity measures (i.e., adaptive, absorptive, and transformative) that reflect the dynamic nature of resilience are inconsistently used. We provide guidance on filling these gaps by 1) informing the development of measures, 2) providing an adapted measurement framework for urban household-level resilience against disasters and environmental shocks and stressors for use in LMICs, and 3) making recommendations for how to contextualize the framework.