Claire Rubin shared a link to Community Disaster Resilience: a Systematic Review on Assessment Models and Tools which is an academic study of how to measure disaster resilience. One quote from the weblink above is below and it points to how we seem to only talk and write in generalities when we are discussing community resilience.
"There was a considerable disparity between the number of papers that included an identifiable reference to “community resilience” and those that actually attempted to measure community resilience (675 vs. 17 respectively). This disparity provides a tangible indication of the proliferation in the use of the concept of “community resilience,” the limited attention paid to its definition and systematic study, and the consequent need to identify a set of predictors that can inform the systematic assessment process."
I do think that measuring disaster resilience is and will not be easy. I'm not a numbers guy and I do fear voodoo types of numerical ratings that are very subjective in the determination of where a community or organization is on a disaster resilience scale.
While this is one study on the topic, expect more to follow as people wrestle with what is the return on investment for spending funds on disaster resilience.
