TY - JOUR
T1 - Standardized disaster and climate resilience grading
T2 - a global scale empirical analysis of community flood resilience
AU - Hochrainer-Stigler, Stefan
AU - Laurien, Finn
AU - Velev, Stefan
AU - Keating, Adriana
AU - Mechler, Reinhard
N1 - Funding Information:
The alliance members who designed and managed the implementation of the Gen 1 tool are the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the Wharton Business School's Risk Management and Decision Processes Center (Wharton), the international development non-governmental organization Practical Action, and Zurich Insurance Group who are also funding the endeavor.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Authors
PY - 2020/12/15
Y1 - 2020/12/15
N2 - Suitable and standardized indicators to track progress in disaster and climate resilience are increasingly considered a key requirement for successfully informing efforts towards effective disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation. Standardized measures of resilience which can be used across different geographical and socioeconomic contexts are however sparse. We present and analyze a standardized community resilience measurement framework for flooding. The corresponding measurement tool is modelled based on and adapted from a so-called ‘technical risk grading’ approach as used in the insurance sector. The grading approach of indicators is based on a two-step process: (i) raw data is collected, and (ii) experts grade the indicators, called sources of resilience, based on this data. We test this approach using approximately 1.25 million datapoints collected across more than 118 communities in nine countries. The quantitative analysis is complemented by content analysis to validate the results from a qualitative perspective. We find that some indicators can more easily be graded by looking at raw data alone, while others require a stronger application of expert judgement. We summarize the reasons for this through six key messages. One major finding is that resilience grades related to subjective characteristics such as ability, feel, and trust are far more dependent on expert judgment than on the actual raw data collected. Additionally, the need for expert judgement further increases if graders must extrapolate the whole community picture from limited raw data. Our findings regarding the role of data and grade specifications can inform ways forward for better, more efficient and increasingly robust standardized assessment of resilience. This should help to build global standardized and comparable, yet locally contextualized, baseline estimates of the many facets of resilience in order to track progress over time on disaster and climate resilience and inform the implementation of the Paris Agreement, Sendai Framework, and the Sustainable Development Goals.
AB - Suitable and standardized indicators to track progress in disaster and climate resilience are increasingly considered a key requirement for successfully informing efforts towards effective disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation. Standardized measures of resilience which can be used across different geographical and socioeconomic contexts are however sparse. We present and analyze a standardized community resilience measurement framework for flooding. The corresponding measurement tool is modelled based on and adapted from a so-called ‘technical risk grading’ approach as used in the insurance sector. The grading approach of indicators is based on a two-step process: (i) raw data is collected, and (ii) experts grade the indicators, called sources of resilience, based on this data. We test this approach using approximately 1.25 million datapoints collected across more than 118 communities in nine countries. The quantitative analysis is complemented by content analysis to validate the results from a qualitative perspective. We find that some indicators can more easily be graded by looking at raw data alone, while others require a stronger application of expert judgement. We summarize the reasons for this through six key messages. One major finding is that resilience grades related to subjective characteristics such as ability, feel, and trust are far more dependent on expert judgment than on the actual raw data collected. Additionally, the need for expert judgement further increases if graders must extrapolate the whole community picture from limited raw data. Our findings regarding the role of data and grade specifications can inform ways forward for better, more efficient and increasingly robust standardized assessment of resilience. This should help to build global standardized and comparable, yet locally contextualized, baseline estimates of the many facets of resilience in order to track progress over time on disaster and climate resilience and inform the implementation of the Paris Agreement, Sendai Framework, and the Sustainable Development Goals.
KW - Expert grading
KW - Flood resilience measurement tool
KW - Floods
KW - Resilience
KW - Standardized resilience grading
KW - Technical grading standards
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85091932880&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.111332
DO - 10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.111332
M3 - Article
C2 - 33010736
AN - SCOPUS:85091932880
SN - 0301-4797
VL - 276
JO - Journal of Environmental Management
JF - Journal of Environmental Management
M1 - 111332
ER -
