Flood resilience measurement for communities: data for science and practice


 <p>Given the increased attention put on strengthening disaster resilience, there is a growing need to invest in its measurement and the overall accountability of resilience strengthening initiatives. There is a major gap in evidence about what actually makes communities more resilient when an event occurs, because there are no empirically validated measures of disaster resilience. Similarly, an effort to identify operational indicators has gained some traction only more recently. The Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC) framework and associated, fully operational, integrated tool takes a systems-thinking, holistic approach to serve the dual goals of generating data on the determinants of community flood resilience, and providing decision-support for on-the-ground investment. The FRMC framework measures &#8220;sources of resilience&#8221; before a flood happens and looks at the post-flood impacts afterwards. It is built around the notion of five types of capital (the 5Cs: human, social, physical, natural, and financial) and the 4Rs of a resilient system (robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, and rapidity). The sources of resilience are graded based on Zurich&#8217;s Risk Engineering Technical Grading Standard. Results are displayed according to the 5Cs and 4Rs, the disaster risk management (DRM) cycle, themes and context level, to give the approach further flexibility and accessibility.</p><p>The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance (ZFRA) has identified the measurement of resilience as a valuable ingredient in building community flood resilience. In the first application phase (2013-2018), we measured flood resilience in 118 communities across nine countries, building on responses at household and community levels. Continuing this endeavor in the second phase (2018 &#8211; 2023) will allow us to enrich the understanding of community flood resilience and to extend this unique data set.</p><p>We find that at the community level, the FRMC enables users to track community progress on resilience over time in a standardized way. It thus provides vital information for the decision-making process in terms of prioritizing the resilience-building measures most needed by the community. At community and higher decision-making levels, measuring resilience also provides a basis for improving the design of innovative investment programs to strengthen disaster resilience.</p><p>By exploring data across multiple communities (facing different flood types and with very different socioeconomic and political contexts), we can generate evidence with respect to which characteristics contribute most to community disaster resilience before an event strikes. This contributes to meeting the challenge of demonstrating that the work we do has the desired impact &#8211; that it actually builds resilience. Our findings suggest that stronger interactions between community functions induce co-benefits for community development.</p>


Given the increased attention put on strengthening disaster resilience, there is a growing need to invest in its measurement and the overall accountability of resilience strengthening initiatives. There is a major gap in evidence about what actually makes communities more resilient when an event occurs, because there are no empirically validated measures of disaster resilience. Similarly, an effort to identify operational indicators has gained some traction only more recently. The Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC) framework and associated, fully operational, integrated tool takes a systems-thinking, holistic approach to serve the dual goals of generating data on the determinants of community flood resilience, and providing decision-support for onthe-ground investment. The FRMC framework measures "sources of resilience" before a flood happens and looks at the post-flood impacts afterwards. It is built around the notion of five types of capital (the 5Cs: human, social, physical, natural, and financial) and the 4Rs of a resilient system (robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, and rapidity). The sources of resilience are graded based on Zurich's Risk Engineering Technical Grading Standard. Results are displayed according to the 5Cs and 4Rs, the disaster risk management (DRM) cycle, themes and context level, to give the approach further flexibility and accessibility.
The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance (ZFRA) has identified the measurement of resilience as a valuable ingredient in building community flood resilience. In the first application phase (2013-2018), we measured flood resilience in 118 communities across nine countries, building on responses at household and community levels. Continuing this endeavor in the second phase (2018 -2023) will allow us to enrich the understanding of community flood resilience and to extend this unique data set.
We find that at the community level, the FRMC enables users to track community progress on resilience over time in a standardized way. It thus provides vital information for the decisionmaking process in terms of prioritizing the resilience-building measures most needed by the community. At community and higher decision-making levels, measuring resilience also provides a basis for improving the design of innovative investment programs to strengthen disaster resilience.
By exploring data across multiple communities (facing different flood types and with very different socioeconomic and political contexts), we can generate evidence with respect to which Over 110 communities in nine countries participated in the roll-out of the FRMC in the first five-year phase of the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance. The Alliance collected over 1.25 million data points, which it has used to improve and streamline the FRMC further, refining both the framework and tool into an easy-to-use approach.
As the Alliance we can now invite others to use the FRMC; so if your community needs to measure its flood resilience, see what the FRMC has to offer or you can contact us for more information: info@floodresilience.net

Who is the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance?
The Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance focuses on building flood resilience. Flood prevention is cost-effective, but nearly 87 per cent 1 of disaster-related aid spending goes into emergency response, reconstruction and rehabilitation, and only 13 per cent 2 towards reducing and managing risks before they became disasters. 3 That is why, in 2013, a multi-organizational partnership -the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance -was created to enhance community flood resilience.

Our vision:
Floods have no negative impact on people's and businesses' ability to thrive.

Our goal:
To increase social, political and financial investment in communitybased flood resilience-building through public, private and third sector partnerships.
Our objectives from 2018 to 2023 are therefore to: Objective 1: Increase funding for flood resilience Objective 2: Strengthen policy at global, national or sub-national level to support flood resilience Objective 3: Improve flood resilience practice What is the FRMC?
The Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (the FRMC) comprises two parts: the Alliance's framework for measuring community flood resilience, and an associated tool for implementing the framework in practice.
For the Alliance, community flood resilience goes beyond infrastructure resilience. Thus our definition of community flood resilience is: "The ability of a community to pursue its development and growth objectives, while managing its flood risk over time in a mutually reinforcing way" (adapted from Keating et al., 2017a 5 ).
There is a lack of evidence about what pre-event resilience-building initiatives actually make a difference when a flood comes. In fact, the United Nations Development Program stated in one of its papers (Winderl, 2014) that: "no general measurement framework for disaster resilience has been empirically verified yet". 6 Measuring the change that resilience-building efforts have is key for demonstrating impact in communities. So, in December 2013, the Alliance set out to develop a framework for measuring community flood resilience, including a methodology for testing and empirically validating the framework, and a technology-based data-gathering and evaluation tool for measurement and assessment of flood resilience.

How does the FRMC work?
The FRMC framework Our framework, also called the 5C-4R framework, combines 44 indicators -so called sources of resilience, on five complementary 'capitals' (5C) 7 as well as four properties derived from resilient system-thinking (4R), that can help people on their development path and also provide capacity to withstand and respond to shocks.
The 5Cs comprise human, social, physical, financial and natural capital. The 5Cs provide greater richness of data about a community's sources of resilience than any single metric such as average income.
Social (social relationships and networks, bonds that promote cooperation, links facilitating exchange of and access to ideas and resources).
Physical (things produced by economic activity from other capital, such as infrastructure, equipment, improvements in crops, livestock).
Natural (natural resource base, including land productivity and actions to sustain it, as well as water and other resources that sustain livelihoods).
Financial (level, variability and diversity of income sources and access to other financial resources that contribute to wealth).
Each capital group contains a set of generic and discrete sources of resilience (which can be thought of as sub-indicators). Across the 5Cs there are 44 sources of resilience, each specifically defined. Sources of resilience are grouped under the four headings of robustness (ability to withstand a shock), redundancy (functional diversity), resourcefulness (ability to mobilize when threatened), and rapidity (ability to contain losses and recover in a timely manner). 8 This 'systems thinking' approach takes into account the assets, interactions and interconnections at community level, and provides consistency when it comes to identifying and testing sources of resilience.

The four properties of a resilient system (4Rs):
Robustness (ability to withstand a shock), for example, housing and bridges built to withstand a flood.
Redundancy (functional diversity), for example having many evacuation routes.
Resourcefulness (ability to mobilize when threatened), for example a group within a community that can quickly mobilize to convert a community center into a flood shelter.
Rapidity (ability to contain losses and recover in a timely manner), for example quick access to sources of financing to support recovery.

The FRMC tool
The second component of the FRMC -the tool -is a practical hybrid software application comprising an online web-based platform for setting up and analyzing the process and a smartphone-or tablet-based app that can be used offline in the field for data collection.
To measure each source of resilience in a given community, data can be collected in four different ways (i.e. household surveys, key informant interviews, focus group discussions, and the use of secondary sources) according to context and need.
After data is collected on the app, it is uploaded to the web application. Assessors grade each of the 44 sources of resilience on an A-D scale (A being best practice, D being poor). Trained assessors compare source definitions with the collected data, drawing on their experience, training, the user manual and related guidance.
The 44 grades between A and D awarded to each community are then aggregated in different ways for analysis. Aggregations, or "lenses", by which resilience can be viewed include the 5Cs and the 4Rs. Further lenses are the seven themes by which questions are sequenced thematically (such as healthcare, education, livelihoods etc.), the five steps of the Disaster Risk Management (DRM) cycle (preparedness, response, recovery, prospective risk reduction, and corrective risk reduction) and many more.

How do we measure the sources of resilience?
We grade each source based on the quantitative and qualitative data points and the benchmarks for best practice.

What does the FRMC do and not do?
The FRMC focuses on flood resilience at the community scale. After long review, and while many aspects or elements of resilience are more general, we believe many are very specific to one peril -in our case flooding -that we wanted to focus our attention on. Also, while resilience can be measured at different scales (national, regional, local), we have chosen to focus on the community level, where flood impacts are felt most strongly, and where much action on improving flood resilience needs to be taken. Also, many humanitarian and civil society organisations (including our Alliance members) primarily work at community level.
Our approach to measuring resilience can be applied to other perils. We can discuss with you how to apply our approach to a different peril using our expertise and approach.
The FRMC supports decision-making and provides evidence of how resilience in a community changes over time. It is not an M&E tool. The FRMC is a fully integrated framework and tool to deploy at various stages of a long-term (multi-year) community resilience-building programme to support decision-making and give evidence of how resilience in a community changes over time.

The FRMC is not a Monitoring & Evaluation tool.
It is not intended to be used as an ex-post project or intervention evaluation framework by external assessors to evaluate a project's efficiency or effectiveness.
The FRMC is a decision-support tool to highlight strengths and weaknesses in community resilience using different perspectives. Results generated with the FRMC can be visualized, arranged and displayed flexibly. This visualization of results provides data for discussions and prioritization exercises, together with the programme communities, to identify interventions to use that could improve community flood resilience. It is also possible to measure the change in resilience in the community over time as strengths are extended and weaknesses improved.

The FRMC is not a decision-making tool.
It will not identify and select solutions. The grades and scores should provide insight into planning processes as one of many sources of information.
The FRMC framework helps you think deeply about resilience. It helps you think about the community with all its interdependencies and lets you visualize the system in which a community functions, with its linkages to higher and smaller scales (e.g. regional and precinct or household scales). It helps you identify connections to other aspects of resilience and the interdependencies that connected them. It also helps you think about how interventions and solutions can support more than just one element or source of resilience, and helps you identify intended as well as unintended consequences.
The FRMC provides information about changes in flood resilience and the direction of the journey for the communities themselves.
The FRMC is not a competitive tool to compare the performance of communities. The aim is not to compare overall resilience scores or compare individual sets of strengths and weaknesses of communities. The numbers/grades and the quantitative aspects of the FRMC are a guide to what the data means, not the outcome. Numbers should not be used as absolutes, rather as relatives and as part of a trajectory over time.
To find out more about the theory and practical use of the FRMC: www.floodresilience.net/FRMC

Can I use the FRMC?
If you operate in a not-for-profit environment to meet community needs, we will consider your interest happily.
The FRMC has been and continues to be applied by the nine organizations comprising the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance across the world in different geographic, cultural and flood-peril related contexts. Critically, the tool has been designed to be as broadly applicable as possible.
For instance, it is currently being deployed in both developed and developing countries, as well as urban, peri-urban and rural settings. It can be applied in communities facing all types of flood threats.
The framework works the same universally -the framework, tool and the data collection processes are the same everywhere -but the interpretation of results and therefore the decision-making processes are highly contextual and can be adapted to specific needs.
The underlying 5C-4R framework and data collected remains comparable and structured so that it will add to our growing pool of data. We can then analyse that data to further refine the framework and improve the overall understanding of what resilience is and how resilience works.
If you fulfil the criteria below, we encourage you to get in touch to discuss how you could benefit from applying the framework in your context of community work.

How do I apply to use the FRMC?
The FRMC has come out of a not-for-profit multi-organizational alliance and required a heavy in-kind and financial investment. As such, the FRMC will remain purely for not-for-profit societal use and cannot be used in a for-profit business environment.
The Alliance also needs to review what additional cost it might incur by using the FRMC with you (e.g. cost of conducting training, additional IT infrastructure use, etc.), and how you could help cover that cost.
Please fill in the following questionnaire so we learn about your organization, the program in which you intend to apply the FRMC, and the purpose of your FRMC application.
Send the form to info@floodresilience.net and use a subject title of "FRMC usage request".
We will review your application and then get in touch with you to discuss next steps. In this discussion with you, we will clarify the exact conditions under which this collaboration will work.

Conditions will include things like:
• signing a terms of reference document laying out the terms and conditions of the collaboration • the time frame in which you intend to operate • the level of mutual engagement we foresee.
Conditions also include more technical agreements of: • how you will use the tool • how you will help us grow the underlying database to analyze flood resilience (including agreement of the corresponding data protection) • your training needs to get ready to use the tool • the support you will need to successfully implement the entire process • how any cost incurred by doing this can be covered.

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Photo credits: Michael Szönyi, Zurich Insurance
Intellectual Property note: a) The Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC) has been developed as a product of the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance (the Alliance) and consists of 1) the measurement framework and associated materials, 2) a hybrid online and mobile app-based software tool, and 3) the data the measurement generates.
b) The FRMC framework and associated materials were developed by organizations working through the Alliance. The framework and associated materials are the joint intellectual property of the Alliance. Materials pertaining to the FRMC may be used and reproduced freely for research and non-profit purposes only.
c) The software: Zurich Insurance contracted and paid IBM to develop and maintain the FRMC software, and hence Zurich owns the IP that is the software and associated technical guidance. Use of the software may be provided for non-commercial purposes only.
d) The data: All data are collected in accordance with ethical data collection practices, and are anonymous at the individual and household levels.
The data within the tool ultimately are controlled by the organizations that collected it. As a condition of using the framework, all organizations have agreed that data will be stored in a central database and be used for research purposes following the signing of an access agreement that Zurich is managing. e) Use-rights: The Alliance are keen for the FRMC to be used as widely as possible, within the time-frame of the current phase running until 2023. Existing partners are encouraged to expand use of the tool within the remit of the Alliance. The Alliance invites expressions of interest by new organizations wishing to use the FRMC by filling out an access request.