Assessing community resilience: validating a universally applicable flood resilience measurement framework and tool

Understanding and strengthening community-level resilience to natural hazard-induced disasters is critical for the management of adverse impacts of such events and the growth of community well-being. A key gap in achieving this is limited standardized and validated disaster resilience measurement frameworks that operate at local levels and are universally applicable. The Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC) is a foremost tool for community flood resilience assessment. It follows a structured approach to comprehensively assess community flood resilience across five classes of capacities (capitals) to support strategic investment in resilience strengthening initiatives. The FRMC is a further development of an earlier version (the FRMT, the Flood Resilience Measurement Tool). The FRMT has been developed and applied between 2015 and 2017 in 118 flood prone communities across nine countries. It has been validated in terms of content and face validity as well as in terms of reliability. To reduce redundancy and survey effort, the FRMC holds a lesser number of indicators (44 versus 88) and has now been applied in over 320 communities across 20 countries. We examine the validation for the revised resilience construct and the new community applications and present a comprehensive overview of the statistical and user validation process and outcomes in both practical and scientific terms. The results confirm the validity, reliability as well as usefulness of the FRMC framework and tool. Furthermore, our approach and results provide insights for other resilience measurement approaches and their validation efforts. We also present a comprehensive discussion about the dynamic aspects of flood resilience at community level, and the many validation aspects that need to be incorporated both in terms of quantification efforts as well as usability on the ground.