Building and Measuring Community Resilience : Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program

The frequency and severity of disasters over the last few decades have presented unprecedented challenges for communities across the United States. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed the complexity and breadth of a deadly combination of existing community stressors, aging infrastructure, and a powerful natural hazard. In many ways, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was a turning point for understanding and managing disasters, as well as related plan making and policy formulation. It brought the phrase "community resilience" into the lexicon of disaster management. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program summarizes the existing portfolio of relevant or related resilience measurement efforts and notes gaps and challenges associated with them. It describes how some communities build and measure resilience and offers four key actions that communities could take to build and measure their resilience in order to address gaps identified in current community resilience measurement efforts. This report also provides recommendations to the Gulf Research Program to build and measure resilience in the Gulf of Mexico region. Table of ContentsFront MatterSummary1 Introduction2 Evaluation of Existing Resilience Measurement Efforts3 Ground Truthing How Communities Measure Resilience4 For Communities: Actions for Building and Measuring Community Resilience5 For the Gulf Research Program: Ways Forward for Building and Measuring Community Resilience in the Gulf RegionReferencesAppendix A: Committee Member BiographiesAppendix B: Public Session AgendasAppendix C: Measurement Tools ReviewedAppendix D: Communities the Committee VisitedAppendix E: Other Communities Considered by the Committee