Measures of Community Resilience:

Over approximately the last ten years, recognition has grown that rather than responding and recovering when disasters strike, communities should be paying much more attention to pre-event mitigation–that is, to activities designed to lessen the impact of disasters. While the concept of “disaster resistant community” is gaining widespread acceptance, more research is needed to better define and operationalize that concept. The “Measures of Resilience” project attempts to develop measures or indicators of disaster resistance that span engineering and societal definitions of resilience as well as all phases in the disaster cycle. When developed, this comprehensive set of measures will make it possible to assess the extent to which communities are moving toward higher levels of disaster resistance.