Towards measuring resilience of flood-prone communities: a conceptual framework

Abstract

Community resilience has become an important policy and research concept for understanding and addressing the challenges associated with the interplay of climate change, urbanization, population growth, land use, sustainability, vulnerability and increased frequency of extreme flooding. Although measuring resilience has been identified as a fundamental step toward its understanding and effective management, there is, however, lack of an operational measurement framework due to the difficulty of systematically integrating socioeconomic and techno-ecological factors. The study examines the challenges, constraints and construct ramifications that have complicated the development of an operational framework for measuring resilience of flood-prone communities. Among others, the study highlights the issues of proliferation of definitions and conceptual frameworks of resilience, challenges of data availability, data variability and data compatibility. Adopting the National Academies’ definition of resilience, a conceptual and mathematical model was developed using the dimensions, quantities and relationships established by the definition. A fuzzy logic equivalent of the model was implemented to generate resilience indices for three flood-prone communities in the United States. The results indicate that the proposed framework offers a viable approach for measuring community flood resilience, even when there is a limitation on data availability and compatibility.