Spiraling-up through drought responses: Building community capacity in Colorado’s farming-dependent counties

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Disclosure statement

The authors have no financial interest or benefit that have arisen from this research.

Notes

1. Studies on the community-level impacts of drought, outside of economic impact analyses, include Vins et al. (2015), Edwards et al. (2015), Nicholls et al. (2006), and Jedd (2019), and are cited throughout the paper.

2. The CCF has also been applied directly in the context of community resilience by, for example, Goodrich et al. (2019) and Thompson and Barrera (2019), further implying interconnectivity between resilience and development concepts.

3. In other words, the maximum or minimum value is set at the rule-of-thumb benchmark qualifying a data point as an outlier. If data qualifying as an outlier is from a farming-dependent county, it is still used in the index calculation for that individual county, but simply receives a score of 1 (for an upper-limit outlier) or 0 (for a lower-limit outlier).

4. Nor is it surprising that the radar charts for certain individual counties do not correlate well with prior work on rural community capacity. Elbert County is again a good example: much of its idiosyncrasies are explained by the fact that it is both a metro and farming-dependent county. We emphasize that in aggregate, the results of the index do conform to the findings of prior literature.

5. Agricultural statistics are included with respect to the number of farms, rather than number of acres, to avoid over-representing small numbers of very large farms.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the State of the Rockies Project at Colorado College.