Toolkit for measuring community disaster resilience: Guidance manual

Major hazards such as hurricanes, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, droughts, and landslides, among others, constantly threaten the lives and livelihoods of the most vulnerable populations across the world. In the context of accelerated climate change and population growth, the current trend of frequent major disasters is expected to increase in the foreseeable future. To mitigate this trend, increased Disaster Resilience is essential to reduce the potential impact of humanitarian crises on the poorest communities who are disproportionately affected by these disasters.

This Toolkit for Measuring Community Disaster Resilience has been developed as a concise and user-friendly tool to measure the level of disaster resilience at community level through the assessment of a broad range of resilience components. These components span five key thematic areas, namely Governance, Risk Assessment, Knowledge and Education, Risk Management and Vulnerability Reduction and Preparedness.

This toolkit builds on the work on disaster resilience by the Inter-Institutional Group, coordinated by the UK Department for International Development (DFID), documented in the publication “Characteristics of Disaster Resilient Communities”.  The toolkit’s development was also informed by consultations with stakeholders at policy and technical level, as well as validation through extensive field-testing in rural indigenous communities in the La Moskitia region of Honduras; urban neighbourhoods in landslide and flood risk zones in Tegucigalpa, Honduras and Port-au-Prince, Haiti; and in rural flood and drought prone areas in Malawi and Ethiopia. It is recommended that this toolkit be applied as part of a wider framework of stakeholder consultations and risk assessments to obtain the fullest understanding possible of all the context specific and complex aspects of disaster resilience at community level.