Assessing the State of Urban Resilience Indicators

As climate change continues unabated, urban areas will be exposed to more frequent and severe extreme weather events. This reality underscores the necessity of planning to cope, adapt, and ultimately improve the... [ view full abstract ]

As climate change continues unabated, urban areas will be exposed to more frequent and severe extreme weather events. This reality underscores the necessity of planning to cope, adapt, and ultimately improve the resilience of urban areas. These processes, however, cannot be effective if stakeholders do not have a shared understanding of how to measure resilience.

One way to achieve this is through participatory indicators, where stakeholders derive a set of variables that are believed to indicate salient changes in system behavior over time. Among the many attributes of a useful indicator, an especially important one is the on-going capacity to collect, store, and report data in a way that is transparent and scientifically sound. As urban resilience is an emerging framework for assessing urban areas, there is little capacity tailored specifically to resilience indicators.

However, social, economic, and environmental indicators at an urban scale have a long history. As a result, capacity to create urban indicators might already exist. Our study addresses this question by surveying place-based indicator processes across the northeast US and categorizing indicators into the components of resilience (hazard, exposure, vulnerability, response, and impact) as well as other attributes.

Our survey examined 115 cities in 40 urban areas across 11 states and one federal district. A total of 39 indicator systems were identified, many at the regional or state level. As a result, 88% of cities had some urban resilience indicator capacity although only 2 indicator systems were explicitly identified as being resilience-focused. Importantly, a large majority of indicators were only applicable to social indicators of vulnerability, leaving a large indicator gap across other resilience components.