Given the increased attention on resilience strengthening in international humanitarian and development work, there is a growing need to invest in its measurement and the overall accountability of resilience strengthening initiatives. The purpose of this article is to present our framework and tool for measuring community-level resilience to flooding and generating empirical evidence and to share our experience in the application of the resilience concept. At the time of writing the tool is being tested in 75 communities across eight countries. Currently 88 potential sources of resilience are measured at the baseline (initial state) and end line (final state) approximately 2 years later. If a flood occurs in the community during the study period, resilience outcome measures are recorded. By comparing pre-flood characteristics to post-flood outcomes, we aim to empirically verify sources of resilience, something which has never been done in this field. There is an urgent need for the continued development of theoretically anchored, empirically verified, and practically applicable disaster resilience measurement frameworks and tools so that the field may (a) deepen understanding of the key components of disaster resilience in order to better target resilience-enhancing initiatives, and (b) enhance our ability to benchmark and measure disaster resilience over time, and (c) compare how resilience changes as a result of different capacities, actions and hazards.

Floods affect more people globally than any other type of natural hazard. Great potential exists for new technologies to support flood disaster risk reduction. In addition to existing expert-based data collection and analysis, direct input from communities and citizens across the globe may also be used to monitor, validate, and reduce flood risk. New technologies have already been proven to effectively aid in humanitarian response and recovery. However, while ex-ante technologies are increasingly utilized to collect information on exposure, efforts directed towards assessing and monitoring hazards and vulnerability remain limited. Hazard model validation and social vulnerability assessment deserve particular attention. New technologies offer great potential for engaging people and facilitating the coproduction of knowledge.

Flood risk is increasing worldwide and there is a growing need to better understand the co-benefits of investments in disaster resilience. Utilizing a multinational community flood resilience dataset, this paper takes a systems approach to understanding community-level flood resilience. Using a cluster analysis and bivariate correlation methods, we develop a typology of community flood resilience capacity based on community characteristics and five capitals (human, financial, natural, physical, and social). Our results reinforce the importance of context-specific policymaking and give recommendations of four distinct clusters to investigate the relationship between flood resilience and prevailing development conditions. We especially find that communities with higher interactions between their capital capacities tend to have higher flood resilience levels. Additionally, there are indications that stronger interactions between community capacities can help to induce multiple co-benefits when investing in disaster resilience. Our results also have important policy implications on the individual community level. For example, based on our results, we suggest that communities with lower flood resilience capacities and interactions can best build resilience on leveraging their relatively higher human capital capacities to strengthen the financial and social capitals. Negative effects might happen for urban communities when co-benefits of natural and physical capital are not fully integrated. The highest flood resilience capacity is found in communities with a well-balanced household income distribution which is likely a contributing factor to the importance of financial capital for this cluster. Our results emphasize the importance of an integrative approach to management when implementing systematic flood disaster resilience metrics and development measures.