A Validation of Metrics for Community Resilience to Natural Hazards and Disasters Using the Recovery from Hurricane Katrina as a Case Study

Abstract

How communities respond to and recover from damaging hazard events could be contextualized in terms of their disaster resilience. Although numerous efforts have sought to explain the determinants of disaster resilience, the ability to measure the concept is increasingly being seen as a key step toward disaster risk reduction. The development of standards that are meaningful for measuring resilience remains a challenge, however. This is partially because there are few explicit sets of procedures within the literature that outline how to measure and compare communities in terms of their resilience. The primary purpose of this article is to advance the understanding of the multidimensional nature of disaster resilience and to provide an externally validated set of metrics for measuring resilience at subcounty levels of geography. A set of metrics covering social, economic, institutional, infrastructural, community-based, and environmental dimensions of resilience was identified, and the validity of the metrics is addressed via real-world application using Hurricane Katrina and the recovery of the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the United States as a case study.