Suitable and standardized indicators to track progress in disaster and climate resilience are increasingly considered a key requirement for successfully informing efforts towards effective disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation. Standardized measures of resilience which can be used across different geographical and socioeconomic contexts are however sparse. We present and analyze a standardized community resilience measurement framework for flooding. The corresponding measurement tool is modelled based on and adapted from a so-called 'technical risk grading' approach as used in the insurance sector. The grading approach of indicators is based on a two-step process: (i) raw data is collected, and (ii) experts grade the indicators, called sources of resilience, based on this data. We test this approach using approximately 1.25 million datapoints collected across more than 118 communities in nine countries. The quantitative analysis is complemented by content analysis to validate the results from a qualitative perspective. We find that some indicators can more easily be graded by looking at raw data alone, while others require a stronger application of expert judgement. We summarize the reasons for this through six key messages. One major finding is that resilience grades related to subjective characteristics such as ability, feel, and trust are far more dependent on expert judgment than on the actual raw data collected. Additionally, the need for expert judgement further increases if graders must extrapolate the whole community picture from limited raw data. Our findings regarding the role of data and grade specifications can inform ways forward for better, more efficient and increasingly robust standardized assessment of resilience. This should help to build global standardized and comparable, yet locally contextualized, baseline estimates of the many facets of resilience in order to track progress over time on disaster and climate resilience and inform the implementation of the Paris Agreement, Sendai Framework, and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Practice and policy have emphasized the need for building resilience to climate-related events in a further warming world. Scholarship has studied resilience largely in terms of process, latent capacity informing vulnerability, or the outcome of risk management interventions, with little work integrating these perspectives. Implementation science work by the Climate Resilience Alliance has developed the Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC) process and tool to measure resilience as an outcome (post-flood mortality and morbidity reduction) and as capacity (pre- and post-intervention levels). This article builds on FRMC analytics to investigate the effect of resilience capacity, represented by five forms of capital (5Cs) and five stages of the disaster risk management (DRM) cycle, on injury and mortality outcomes across 66 flood-affected communities in seven Global South countries. Data were collected using household surveys, community focus groups, key informant interviews, and secondary sources. We applied a quasi-experimental regression design, controlling for demographic and flood hazard/exposure variables, to estimate the effect of 5Cs and DRM stages on health outcomes. Results show that social and human capital help reduce injuries after floods, and preparedness lowers both deaths and injuries. Some results were unexpected, such as the positive association between natural capital and delayed deaths, where limited gains in natural capital may not yield meaningful protection in communities with degraded ecosystems. This study finds that preparedness is the most consistent predictor of positive health outcomes, while forms of 5Cs may not translate into reduced mortality. By combining 5Cs, DRM stages, and health indicators, this paper contributes to bridging a gap in the literature and offers policy-relevant insights for improving community-level disaster response.

In the context of increasing measured climate-related risks and observed impacts across the globe, the need for transformative adaptation is seeing heightened attention, which implies consideration shifts from conventional, response-and incremental-focussed approaches for addressing climate-related risks towards transformative approaches to prevent existential impacts associated with climate-related disasters and enable sustainable futures. Yet, little reported success with observed adaptation exists and little is now about the capacity of communities to implement transformation. In this study we use a most widely used and validated resilience measurement tool to estimate capacity for transformation resilience across the globe. We do so by applying the systematic resilience measurement framework developed by the Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities tool to examine the potential for transformational resilience as compared to absorptive and adaptive resilience. For this research we utilize the Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC) framework in order to evaluate absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities as key enablers of resilience. The FRMC tool comprises 44 discrete sources of resilience, which are indicators that are measured during normal (non-flood) and post-flood times via household surveys, community group discussions, focus group discussions with stakeholders that are part of the Flood Resilience Alliance, key informant interviews, and existing secondary data sources. This study encompass 22 countries and 325 communities. The analysis focuses on absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities and examines how these capacities evolve over time in response to changes in environmental, social, and economic conditions. We further measure their changes across two distinct time periods. While absorptive capacities focus on coping with and recovering from shocks, adaptive capacities enable incremental adjustments to manage evolving risks. Transformative capacity, essential for addressing intolerable risks and driving systemic change. We overall find absorptive and adaptive resilience capacities to dominate the results, but in a number of vulnerable communities we identify solid levels of transformative capacity. We suggest further efforts ought to be expanded on bolstering the transformative capacity, where it exists, of communities in order to better brace those for further increases in the severity of climate-related risks.