Social resilience indicators for disaster-related contexts

Dr Layla Khoja, Prof. Renate Schubert and Dr Jonas Joerin from the Future Resilient Systems (FRS) programme propose a comprehensive set of indicators to quantify social resilience for the context of disasters in their study “Social Resilience Indicators for Disaster Related Contexts: A Literature Review”.

In this study, the authors conducted a systematic review of nearly 100 social resilience related publications appearing between 1998 and 2019. They aimed at addressing the substantial lack of consistency in similar previous reviews, selecting and justifying a new set of indicators and their relevance for the assessment of social resilience towards disasters.

In their review, the FRS researchers extracted 88 social resilience indicators referring mostly to human and social capital. Specifically, they identified indicators that are highly relevant for specific types of disasters and specific regions. They suggest that not all social resilience indicators are equally important for different disaster types (e.g., natural hazards, climate change related disasters, terrorism and violence, or multiple disasters). Hence, they propose that social resilience indicators and assessments should vary according to the disasters that are studied.

Furthermore, the review shows that specific social resilience indicators are more or less relevant for specific regions (such as North and South America, Oceania, Asia, Europe or Africa). A region-specific choice of social resilience indicators has to take into account different cultural, socio-political, or economic contexts as well as the types of disasters threatening the respective regions.

Overall, this study has demonstrated the possibility to distinguish between indicators of high or low relevance in analysing the social resilience of social units or communities. Local government authorities or decision makers in general can make effective use of the results of this study to assess the resilience of their respective populations, either at a given moment in time or in long-term panel studies.

Likewise, the results of this study can be used to improve institutional and physical structures of communities so that higher levels of social resilience towards disasters might be achieved in the future.

For full details, please download the working paper Download “Social Resilience Indicators for Disaster Related Contexts: A Literature Review”. (PDF, 1.7 MB)