A value-focused thinking approach to measure community resilience

Abstract

Community resilience refers to the ability to prepare for, absorb, recover from, and adapt to disruptive events, but specific definitions and measures for resilience can vary widely from researcher to researcher or from discipline to discipline. Community resilience is often measured using a set of indicators based on census, socioeconomic, and community organizational data, but these metrics and measures for community resilience provide little guidance for policymakers to determine how best to increase the community resilience. This article proposes to measure community resilience based on value focused thinking. We propose an objectives hierarchy that begins with a community decision makers' fundamental objective for resilience. Six high level objectives for community resilience, including social resilience, economic resilience, infrastructure resilience, environmental resilience, availability of resources, and functionality of critical services, are broken down into measurable attributes that focus on specific outcomes that a decision maker would like to achieve if a disruption occurs. This new way of assessing resilience is applied to measure the resilience of an illustrative community to an improvised explosive device, a cyberattack, a tornado, a flood, and a winter storm. Keywords: Community Resilience, Resiliency, Risk Analysis.