Measuring flood resilience: the Zurich Flood Resilience Measurement Tool
Source
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
Practical Action
Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center
Zurich Insurance Group Limited
Publication Year
2017
Number of pages
2 p.
This policy brief describes the Zurich Flood Resilience Measurement Tool, an innovation in community flood resilience theory and practice. Large-scale application in over 70 communities worldwide, with consistent measuring of pre-event characteristics and post-event outcomes, is generating novel empirical evidence about what really makes a community resilient to floods. The brief highlights the importance of measuring community flood resilience to inform future planning and interventions, and to demonstrate the impact of resilience-enhancing initiatives.
Key recommendations
- Measuring resilience is critical to demonstrate the impact of resilience-enhancing initiatives, but few measurement frameworks exist and hardly any have been validated in the field.
- Measurement frameworks need to examine both sources of resilience and outcomes, and consistent measuring over time and over different communities will generate empirical evidence for which sources really make a difference for outcomes across different contexts.
- A new tool for measuring community flood resilience has been developed based on a systems approach, incorporating measures of robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness and rapidity across a community’s stock of human, social, physical, financial and natural capital.
Also available in Spanish: Medir la resiliencia comunitaria frente a inundaciones: la herramienta del Programa Zurich