Temporal and spatial change in disaster resilience in US counties, 2010–2015^*

* Data are available on the Hazards & Vulnerability Research Institute (HVRI) website: http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/geog/hvri/hvri-resources.

ABSTRACT

The allure of disaster resilience studies continues to garner interest by policy makers and academics alike. While there are advances in assessing communities’ resilience to natural hazards at different scales, monitoring changes in resilience lags behind. This paper updates the 2010 Baseline Resilience Index for Communities (BRIC) using the six different domains of disaster resilience. The purpose is to test for significant spatial and temporal change in county index values by providing a comparative assessment of increased or decreased resilience over a five-year period across the U.S. The significance of monitoring change is to empirically demonstrate the dynamic nature of resilience and the causal mechanisms that lead to increasing or decreasing resilience in places. Such evidence sets the stage for implementing intervention policies or programs designed to enhance disaster resilience. The national distribution of BRIC index values in 2015 is generally similar to the 2010 BRIC distribution, but there are some notable regional differences. For example, there is a decrease in resilience in the South, the Great Lakes states, and the Central U.S., with improved resilience in the west and Pacific Coast states. The individual domains of institutional resilience and community capital, have the highest and lowest level of variation, respectively.

KEYWORDS:

• Disaster resilience
• spatial change
• temporal change
• United States

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Susan L. Cutter http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7005-8596

Notes

* Data are available on the Hazards & Vulnerability Research Institute (HVRI) website: http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/geog/hvri/hvri-resources.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no direct funding for this work, but it is an outgrowth of previous research supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Award #1132755.