Reviewing and comparing indices for vulnerability and resilience assessment: What is a good index?

Abstract

Community resilience is a critical concept that has gained increasing attention in recent decades. It refers to a community's ability to resist or recover from various shocks and stressors, including natural disasters, economic downturns, public health crises, and social disruptions. Assessing community resilience is essential for effective disaster preparedness, response, and recovery, as well as for enhancing overall community well-being. Over the decades, there are a lot of indices built by researchers to represent/reflect the community resilience level. For example, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) proposed and developed National Risk Index for Natural Hazards, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) built Social Vulnerability Index, Census Bureau conducted an experimental estimate: The Community Resilience Estimates (CRE). However, there are a few basic questions that needed to be discussed: What is a good model to represent community resilience? What indicators are needed to reflect community resilience? How to measure community resilience at the best based on the research area, selection of data and methods, users, etc.? Does the index work as it is expected? To answer the questions, this research collected and calculated five well-known indices, FEMA National Risk Index, CDC Social Vulnerability Index, Census Bureau Community Resilience Index, Environmental Justice Index, Resilience Inference Measurement (RIM) Score, we conducted analyses including domain representative comparison, descriptive and correlation analysis, inferential ability and adaptability to provide constructive suggestions for community resilience measurement approaches and index applications.