Operationalizing Resilience against Natural Disaster Risk: Opportunities, Barriers, and a Way Forward

This white paper suggests that a better appreciation, understanding, and measurement of resilience is needed to address the major challenges in relation to disaster risk globally. This will help balance disaster risk and the opportunity for community socioeconomic development. This paper synthesizes the research and shows the following: (1) resilience can be defined by distinct properties; (2) it can be operationalized through an IRM process; and (3) it can be measured at a certain point in time and over time. The review lays out a methodological approach within a systems framework that can be taken to communities in a series of case studies within the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance program. By systematically collecting data and through the co-generation of knowledge and action with the communities and testing within this framework, it is able to build up an evidence-based measure of the characteristics of disaster resilience in communities.