Baton Rouge, Louisiana | Wednesday, April 30, 2025

A Synthesis of Resilience Measurement Methods and Indices

(Funded by Louisiana Sea Grant)

This project is a collaboration of researchers from Department of Environmental Sciences at Louisiana State University and Department of Geography at University of Hawaii at Manoa. The team consists of experts in resilience and sustainability modeling — Nina S Lam (PI) and geospatial analysis and modeling — Yi Qiang (Co-PI).

Coastal zones throughout the globe are facing a critical challenge: How to develop and promote resilience for coastal communities in light of the various coastal threats? Community resilience analysis is a transparent way to represent the complex human/environment interaction. This project will focus on: 1) What are the definitions and semantics of resilience across disciplines and hazards? 2) What are the state-of-the-art community resilience measurement methods regarding natural hazards? 3) Which indicators have been used? 4) What are the most representative indicators? From this effort, a Web-based application will be developed for researchers and general users to choose a definition, indicator and method to calculate resilience of coastal Louisiana communities.

The goal of this project is to conduct a synthesis study on resilience measurement methods and key indicators used. There are four specific objectives:
        1.To identify and collect the existing literature about community resilience to derive the knowledge of community resilience definition, measurement methods developed, resilience indicators tested, and adaptive strategies adopted.
        2.To develop an ontology of resilience measurement and the indicators used through an in-depth content analysis of the literature. The ontology will capture the key knowledge components related to resilience measurement and will serve as a foundation for information management, knowledge sharing, analysis, and modeling.
        3.To derive the consensus on the community resilience key indicators for improving mitigation and adaptation strategies and provide information on the effectiveness of various resilience measurement models.
        4. To develop a web-based application for resilience related data management and visualization which will enable users to evaluate the effects of various indicators on the resiliency of communities.