Measuring community resilience to climate risks is key for R4C

Resilience for Communities (R4C) is a multi-year program designed to strengthen climate resilience and help address social inequities in communities where existing stresses combined with growing climate shocks makes those communities even more vulnerable.

One of the biggest challenges for the R4C program is helping these communities move from resilience theory to practical implementation of resilience strategies on the ground, then measure the success of such efforts.

To meet this challenge, Resilient Cities Network (R-Cities) began its collaboration with the Z Zurich Foundation and Zurich North America to create the R4C program. The program aims to increase the resilience capacity of four communities in two U.S. cities through equitable community engagement, applying practical applications to measure community resilience, and co-developing and implementing resilience solutions with the community.

At the heart of the R4C program is the Climate Resilience Measurement for Communities (CRMC) tool.

“The CRMC is actually both a process and a tool,” said Laurian Farrell, Regional Director of the Resilient Cities Network in North America. “It provides a technical framework for measuring community resilience that builds upon the original 100 Resilient Cities’ City Resilience Framework, and as such, the language and concepts are very familiar to Chief Resilience Officers. The CRMC helps communities to understand their resilience capacity and to see where they can build up that capacity to better withstand the inevitable shocks and stresses they will face due to our changing climate.”

R-Cities is applying the CRMC tool in two communities in Boston and two communities in Houston.

From flood resilience to climate resilience

Extreme heat is one of the deadliest climate hazards cities face today, and flooding remains the most frequent and costly natural disaster in the United States. The impacts of both hazards on urban communities are predicted to grow exponentially as climate change magnifies their already deadly intensity. As the effects of floods and heat become more frequent and severe, the CRMC is an important tool to support communities in achieving climate resilience.

The CRMC is the third iteration of the Flood Risk Measurement for Communities tool (FRMC). The FRMC was developed by the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance in 2013 to measure community resilience to flooding in rural communities around the world.

The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance recognized that to understand if resilience interventions are making an impact, the level of resilience in a community must be measured before and after the intervention is in place. Measurements must be consistent and reliable and capture the characteristics of a community that truly make it resilient. With the CRMC, the resilience experts within the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance have expanded the characteristics of resilience to include community responses to the climate shock of extreme heat. R-Cities is the first to deploy and pilot the CRMC in urban communities and to test the new characteristics of community resilience to heat as well as flooding.

“The Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities tool has been successfully implemented in rural and farming communities in places like Vietnam, Tibet and South America,” said Daniel Kahler, the R4C program’s lead for Zurich North America. “The enhancements of the climate resilience tool allow us to evaluate urban communities where population densities and topography present a unique set of challenges when dealing with the shocks and stresses of flood, heat and other extreme weather. The CRMC tool also helps ensure that marginalized communities are represented in decision-making processes.”

The CRMC process is supported by a web-based tool and an app for mobile devices that allow for the effective designing of studies and smooth and seamless data collection and analysis.

The process involves collecting data to assess dozens of indicators that have the capability of generating resilience. The CRMC organizes the various systems that communities navigate into five groupings, referred to as “capitals.” These include: human, physical, financial, natural and social capitals.

Behind each capital is a series of indicators, or sources of resilience, that can be measured when times are good (normal day) and revisited after a climate event, or when an intervention is put in place. In this way, a measurement of the change in resilience can also be calculated.

Community engagement

Through a variety of targeted engagements with the community and a series of questions relating to the resilience sources, data is collected using a web-based application.

These engagements may be in the form of household surveys, conducted by trained fieldworkers; focus group discussions with community members and experts; or interviews with key informants (technical specialists with an intimate familiarity with the community). Data can also be input using secondary data, such as collecting data already available from the city or community through previous efforts.

Finally, trained graders meet to review the data and assign a “resilience grade” from A to D. Results are utilized by the team, in consultation with community members, to identify areas for improvement, and the grading guides the development of resilience projects for implementation.

The CRMC uses a systems-based approach to building resilience capacity and helps communities to visualize the complex and interconnected aspects of their lives. It encourages communities to think about the whole community system and its interdependencies, and it also encourages city practitioners to engage in meaningful dialogue with residents by providing the framework, language and settings to engage in an authentic and equitable way.

“As the effects of flooding and heat become more frequent and severe, cities need to make critical decisions.” Farrell said. “The CRMC is a practical tool that supports meaningful dialogue between cities and the communities that they serve, and we have found that communities are responding really positively to the opportunity to share their stories and their own ideas for their resilient futures.”

By teaming up with the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, the communities in the R4C program will be included in the greater global research program that allows comparison between communities and geographies and will ultimately lead to better decision-making on investments in community development globally.