Measuring flood resilience: the Zurich Flood Resilience Measurement Tool

This policy brief describes the Zurich Flood Resilience Measurement Tool, an innovation in community flood resilience theory and practice. Large-scale application in over 70 communities worldwide, with consistent measuring of pre-event characteristics and post-event outcomes, is generating novel empirical evidence about what really makes a community resilient to floods. The brief highlights the importance of measuring community flood resilience to inform future planning and interventions, and to demonstrate the impact of resilience-enhancing initiatives.

Key recommendations

• Measuring resilience is critical to demonstrate the impact of resilience-enhancing initiatives, but few measurement frameworks exist and hardly any have been validated in the field.
• Measurement frameworks need to examine both sources of resilience and outcomes, and consistent measuring over time and over different communities will generate empirical evidence for which sources really make a difference for outcomes across different contexts.
• A new tool for measuring community flood resilience has been developed based on a systems approach, incorporating measures of robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness and rapidity across a community’s stock of human, social, physical, financial and natural capital.

Also available in Spanish: Medir la resiliencia comunitaria frente a inundaciones: la herramienta del Programa Zurich