Publications

The “community resilience” ideal breaks with earlier status quo thinking that it is enough for society to respond to disasters as they occur. Mounting human and economic losses and a several-decades-long upward trajectory in the extreme events (i.e., tropical storms, flooding, drought, and wildfire) occurring each year have made such a reactionary position no longer tenable. Policymakers, practitioners, and populations now aspire more fully for communities to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and emerge even stronger after a disaster.¹

Over the last decade, newly developed models and measurement schemes have given researchers and decision-makers a more systematic way to study community resilience and intervene to strengthen it.^2–4 Because of the problem’s complexity and developers’ and users’ interests, however, these models and measures vary greatly.² For instance, some emphasize physical structures, from an engineering perspective, while others focus on institutional and interpersonal elements, informed by the social and behavioral sciences.⁵