Abstract
Communities that can increase their resilience are in a better position to absorb losses and other adverse impacts from climate-related natural hazards and disasters. For this assertion to be useful, however, insight regarding how to better measure and benchmark the concept will be valuable. This is because existing metrics aimed at measuring resilience suffer from a number of key limitations. Important characteristics of hazard and community context are often ignored. Moreover, most indicator-based methods represent a broad-brushed approach that often neglects the true underlying drivers (or lack thereof) of resilience at the community level. It is within this context that the purpose of this presentation is to describe the results of an MS-AL Sea Grant funded project aimed at developing an integrated measurement framework to better understand drivers of community resilience within the Mississippi and Alabama coastal zip codes. The methodology includes: 1) the identification of context-specific characteristics that drive the resilience of communities and businesses along the entirety of the Mississippi and Alabama coast; 2) the utilization of “top-down” (quantitative) and “bottom-up” (stakeholder-led) approaches; and 3) a better understanding of how hazard extent and scale affect resilience modeling results. With improved resilience metrics, our vision is to provide governments, risk managers, community and business leaders, and researchers new opportunities to create local initiatives and equitable public policy programs to increase the capacity of communities to mitigate, respond, and recover effectively and efficiently from damaging climate-related events.
