A New Resilience Rating System for Countries and States

SKI Focal Report 8, 2013

This Focus Report provides a background to the measurement of resilience. Its first section introduces the topic and explores the reasons why resilience should be measured. Looking at the utilities of a resilience index, this report differentiates between the most central awareness and policy-guidance functions of such an instrument. The report’s second section presents three different approaches to measure resilience. In each case study, the report explores the development and application, benefits and limitations of the index at hand. The third section discusses the pitfalls and potentials of resilience index-making at a more general level. The concluding section highlights the likely implications arising from this discussion for the development of a resilience index in Switzerland.

This Focus Report provides a background to the measurement of resilience. Its first section introduces the topic and explores the reasons why resilience should be measured. Looking at the utilities of a resilience index, this report differentiates between the most central awareness and policy-guidance functions of such an instrument. The report’s second section presents three different approaches to measure resilience. In each case study, the report explores the development and application, benefits and limitations of the index at hand. The third section discusses the pitfalls and potentials of resilience index-making at a more general level. The concluding section highlights the likely implications arising from this discussion for the development of a resilience index in Switzerland.

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 2016

2018

Communities face various catastrophic events like earthquake that threat their performances. A resilient community can resist a disruptive event and absorb the loss of performance. Various parameters have effective role in increasing the ability of a community to withstand the performance loss. In order to investigate the effectiveness of various socio-economic indicators on the resilience of a community there is a need to define a comprehensive comparable resilience index which takes into account the most important factors of loss in an integrated manner. In this paper a resilience index is defined based on economic concepts and modification factors are defined to make the proposed index independent of unequal conditions like intensity measure of earthquake, number of affected people etc. These modifications allow the resilience index to be comparable in different earthquakes. Finally the propose resilience index is implemented on some earthquakes in Iran during 1990 to 2012.

Economía y Negocios, 2018

The main objective of this research is to define resilience within the parameters of Complex Adaptive Systems and to understand its dynamics within heuristic model of panarchy to evaluate the characteristics of the regional systems that could be affected by natural disasters. The analytical methods and variables identified are systemized and evaluated considering the reality of the territories located in developing countries where information is deficient or non-existent. Resilience is considered multidimensional, so that eight dimensions of analysis can be identified. We propose 56 study criteria that were obtained from various cases and opinions of experts from Ecuador and Chile.

Risk Analysis, 2016

Due to persistent and serious threats from natural disasters around the globe, many have turned to resilience and vulnerability research to guide disaster preparation, recovery, and adaptation decisions. In response, scholars and practitioners have put forth a variety of disaster indices, based on quantifiable metrics, to gauge levels of resilience and vulnerability. However, few indices are empirically validated using observed disaster impacts and, as a result, it is often unclear which index should be preferred for each decision at hand. Thus, we compare and empirically validate five of the top U.S. disaster indices, including three resilience indices and two vulnerability indices. We use observed disaster losses, fatalities, and disaster declarations from the southeastern United States to empirically validate each index. We find that disaster indices, though thoughtfully substantiated by literature and theoretically persuasive, are not all created equal. While four of the five indices perform as predicted in explaining damages, only three explain fatalities and only two explain disaster declarations as expected by theory. These results highlight the need for disaster indices to clearly state index objectives and structure underlying metrics to support validation of the results based on these goals. Further, policy makers should use index results carefully when developing regional policy or investing in resilience and vulnerability improvement projects.

Work (Reading, Mass.), 2012

The main objective of this work is to propose a method and a tool to support the development of indicators able to inform an organization about the state of its resilience through a cyclical process of identifying its resilience factors, proposing resilience indicators, assessing its organizational resilience followed by assessing and improving the resilience indicators. The research uses concepts from complex adaptive systems and from resilience engineering to establish an initial set of indicators able to assess elements that contribute to organizational resilience, and structures them temporarily as a hierarchy. A software application to support indicator definition and structuring, questionnaire generation, and result assessment activities was built to assist in speeding up the experiment-adjust cycle. Prototype indicators were instantiated with helicopter operating companies in mind, and were reviewed by a domain expert.

2013

There is currently a wave of enthusiasm for “building resilience” in the international humanitarian and development sectors. This has coincided with a number of attempts to both define what resilience is and devise ways of measuring it. However, rather than comprehensively reviewing these attempts, this paper presents Oxfam GB’s own approach for both understanding and measuring resilience. It begins by interrogating the essence of resilience and substantiating its multidimensional nature. This is followed by describing the conceptual framework underlying the approach and how it applies the Alkire-Foster method used in the measurement of multidimensional constructs, such as poverty and women’s empowerment. Thereafter, the approach’s utility in informing situational analyses, outcome tracking, and impact evaluations is described, using primary data collected from Ethiopia’s Somali Region. A critical review of its strengths and limitations is presented.

Journal of community psychology, 2018

This article is aimed at describing and validating a new short version of the National Resilience Scale (NR-13). The available 25-item National Resilience Scale has been employed and validated by several studies. However, the present data show that it can be substantially shortened without losing either its reliability or its validity. The new short version of the scale has been examined by the responses of an Israeli sample of adults (N = 1022). Results indicate, as expected, that national resilience promoting factors (community resilience and sense of coherence) significantly and positively predict NR-13. A resilience-suppressing factor (sense of danger) negatively and significantly predicts NR-13. These predictions have been replicated in an additional sample of Israeli higher education students (N = 423). These results support the reliability and the validity of the short National Resilience Scale (NR-13).

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

Resilience is the ability of a system to return to its normal operation state after a change or disturbance. Frequently, resilience of a system can be only empirically estimated due to the complexity of the underlying mechanisms. While traditional dependability uses quantitative characteristics based on averaging the impacts of faults, resilience requires more focused attributes on the impacts of disturbances. The paper summarizes the main requirements on the statistical background needed for resilience characterization and presents an approach based on Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) helping to understand disturbance impacts and their respective quantitative characterization.

2012

At the Emerging Markets Forum in October 2010, initial results were presented from an exercise that attempted to measure the resilience of emerging market countries (EMCs) 1 to deal with shocks to their economies. In an earlier paper, it had been argued that rather than de-coupling from the more developed economies, the EMCs-like the advanced countries themselves-were becoming ever more interconnected within the global economic and financial system. Following the crises of the last five years, there is little if any argument that can be presented against this proposition. The crisis that emerged in the United States had immediate negative spillover effects on EMCs: exports, tourism, capital flows, remittances, etc. all declined sharply. This interdependence that now exists requires that countries have the capacity to counter the negative effects on their economies from adverse developments elsewhere. Even beyond that, at least for the larger of the EMCs, those countries can help support the global system in the face of weaknesses elsewhere-as they did in 2009. The index that was presented at the 2010 Forum attempted to measure that capacity, or what we refer to as Resilience. The resilience of a country is a function of many factors. These include the quality of the government, and governance in general; the strength of its institutions, especially the economic and financial policymaking institutions in the country; the soundness of its banking sector-and the financial sector more broadly; the structure of the economy-including such things as its export dependency and diversity,

2021

Resilience is the capacity of any system to maintain its function, structure and identity despite disturbances. Assessing resilience has been elusive due to high levels of abstraction that are difficult to empirically test, or the lack of high quality data required once appropriate proxies are identified. Most resilience assessments are limited to specific situation arenas, making comparision one of the unresolved challenges. Here we show how leveraging comparative analysis can provide insights on how Arctic communities (N = 40) can best deal with social and environmental change. We found that the capacity to self-organize, and nurturing diversity are sufficient conditions for Arctic communities whose livelihoods have been resilient, or for communities whose livelihoods have been transformed. Our study provides an alternative perspective on how to assess resilience by leveraging comparsion across cases. It also identify governance patways to support adaptations and transformations i...

SSRN Electronic Journal

PLOS ONE

Measuring disaster resilience is a key component of successful disaster risk management and climate change adaptation. Quantitative, indicator-based assessments are typically applied to evaluate resilience by combining various indicators of performance into a single composite index. Building upon extensive research on social vulnerability and coping/adaptive capacity, we first develop an original, comprehensive disaster resilience index (CDRI) at municipal level across Italy, to support the implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030. As next, we perform extensive sensitivity and robustness analysis to assess how various methodological choices, especially the normalisation and aggregation methods applied, influence the ensuing rankings. The results show patterns of social vulnerability and resilience with sizeable variability across the northern and southern regions. We propose several statistical methods to allow decision makers to explore the territorial, social and economic disparities, and choose aggregation methods best suitable for the various policy purposes. These methods are based on linear and nonliner normalization approaches combining the OWA and LSP aggregators. Robust resilience rankings are determined by relative dominance across multiple methods. The dominance measures can be used as a decision-making benchmark for climate change adaptation and disaster risk management strategies and plans.

2017