First validated flood resilience measurement framework for communities

Updated Mar 27, 2019

First validated flood resilience measurement framework for communities

https://www.zurich.com/en/sustainability/flood-resilience/measuring-flood-resilience

Michael Szoenyi

Based on an UNDP statement that no validated resilience measurement framework exists, using learnings from research, from on-site experience in communities and using Zurich’s risk expertise, we created a holistic resilience measurement framework.

Please see https://www.zurich.com/en/corporate-responsibility/flood-resilience/measuring-flood-resilience for further details - a four pager and short videos explain very vividly how the innovation works.
The scientific paper (Keating et al., 2017) is available here: ...

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Stage 4: Transition to Scale

Our measurement framework has progressed from an "on-paper" concept, tested and accompanied by research, to an online-with-App proof-of-concept applied in over 100 communities. We are now scaling this with partners and beyond to a global stage.

Focus Areas:

Livestock & Agriculture, Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change and Resilience

Implemented In:

Mexico, Nepal, Indonesia and 8 MoreSEE ALL

Countries Implemented In

$750,000

Funds Raised to Date

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Problem

The UN Development Program (Winderl 2014) stated that currently no validated measurement framework for resilience exists.

There is an urgent need for the continued development of theoretically anchored, empirically verified, and practically applicable disaster resilience measurement frameworks and tools (Keating et al 2017) to identify what works in resilience building and what does not.

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Solution

We, the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance comprising of a multi-sector partnership of academia, humanitarian organizations and the private sector, are building the first empirically validated community-level resilience measurement framework using an online tool and an App, for use in diverse geographies and contexts to measure and demonstrate community-level impacts of resilience buliding activities, ranging beyond the classical physical flood protection, grey infrastructure approach.

Target Beneficiaries

The tool and framework helps practitioners in the field of DRR and community resilience, which in turn can serve much better vulnerable and marginalized, flood exposed communities in need of better decision-support tools. The validation using pre- and post-flood data to cross-check sources and outcomes of resilience will help future decision-making for potentially millions of beneficiaries.

Mission and Vision

We aim to scale this tool beyond its current application in our programs and affiliated programs of our community implementing partners.

Competitive Advantage

There currently is no empirically validated measurement framework that uses such simple and easily-accessible technology.

Planned Goals and Milestones

The measurement framework and tool can be scaled beyond its current remit. One step to make this happen is to simplify further the data collection needs necessary for the assessment of community flood resilience by using crowd-and-cloud-sourcing of currently existing data, where applicable, and to simplify and automate the assessment process where possible.