Making Cities Resilient Report 2012

CHAPTER 5 | LOOKING FORWARD: WHAT ARE SOME POSSIBLE APPROACHES TO MEASURING RESILIENCE IN CITIES
LOOKING FORWARD: WHAT ARE SOME POSSIBLE APPROACHES TO MEASURING
RESILIENCE IN CITIES
Local governments have expressed the need to benchmark their urban
resilience efforts with clear quantitative indicators. This type of indicator will
help local decision-makers prioritise resilience activities and understand the
value of their investments in these areas.
Several local governments noted that the HFA Local Government Self-Assessment Tool, developed under
the Making Cities Resilient Campaign, has been important in helping them to understand and recognise
priority areas for action; some plan to use it for benchmarking. The self-assessment tool offers many
qualitative indicators for measuring resilience. These can serve as a reference and starting point for city
managers, planners, engineers, architects and economists as they develop more quantitative indicators
and standards for resilience building at city level, set targets and make improvements over time. For
example, the indicator under Essential 1 of the self-assessment tool on the extent of partnerships for
disaster risk reduction requires that local authorities determine how to quantify the effectiveness of those
partnerships in reducing risk. Similarly, under Essential 6, the strength of existing land use regulations
requires more exact parameters in order to measure what constitutes strong regulations. Annex 4 contains
a summary table of city activities that were presented in Chapter 4, organised by the indicators that form
part of the local-level self-assessment tool.
Rather than defining precise indicators, this chapter presents ideas about what should be measured to
understand urban resilience. It outlines what city managers and politicians consider appropriate indicators
for resilience and is based on interviews conducted for this report. The indicators cited are context-specific
and highlight that city-level indicators must be developed locally. This chapter also outlines possible
indicators to help understand the resilience that urban centres may have already accumulated through
the process of urbanisation, apart from specific resilience activities that directly address natural hazards.
The former highlight the built-in resilience that is characteristic of well-governed cities, regardless of the
impacts of natural hazards, but which are, nevertheless, important measures of resilience.
This chapter also looks at two specific areas of focus as the campaign moves forward; urban planning and
financing disaster risk reduction.
The expanding body of literature on how to measure resilience reflects the growing interest across a
variety of fields of inquiry. This includes measuring resilience in urban areas 17 . In collaboration with UNISDR
and other partners, UN-Habitat’s new Urban Resilience Indexing Programme launched during the Rio+20
Conference 2012 will develop new standards for measuring and scaling any city’s resilience to natural,
environmental, social and economic crises, and provide tools, training and support to achieving them.
What do local governments see as the key indicators for building
resilience in their city
During the 11 personal interviews conducted with mayors and city managers for this chapter, respondents
were asked to outline what they consider important milestones for building resilience, and the key
ingredients for successful risk reduction. The results are reported in Box 5.1.
17. Some studies have produced lists of indicators, organised by themes, which provide a framework for understanding resilience and offer
guidance for actions. These include frameworks developed by Twigg (2007) and Cutter et al (2008). This is a similar approach to that adopted
by the Ten Essentials, and indeed there are many similarities between these three systems. Tierney and Bruneau (2007) and Zobel (2011) have
adopted a much more quantitative approach (72, 73, 74).
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