On the suitability of assessment tools for guiding communities towards disaster resilience

Resilience is now a ubiquitous concept in many science and policy circles. It is a polysemic concept that has been defined differently in different disciplines and contexts. An often used definition, in the context of community resilience, is provided by the National Academies. According to this definition resilience is "the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events" (the four abilities). Over the past two decades various tools have been developed for assessing community resilience. This study examines 36 selected community resilience assessment tools to find out if they are suitable for adequately addressing the four abilities of resilience. A framework, identifying various measures that can contribute to addressing each of the four resilience abilities is developed. Evaluating selected tools using this framework indicates only few of them are reasonably suitable for addressing measures related to the four resilience abilities. Overall performance of the selected tools is particularly poor in terms of addressing measures related to absorption and adaptation abilities. Detailed results related to performance of each tool are provided. Developers can use these results to understand shortcomings of their assessment tools and address them in the revised versions.