The Institute of Public Policy at Mizzou, with funding from a National Science Foundation EPSCoR grant, spent three years researching what makes communities resilient in the face of natural and human-made threats. The goal of this research was to provide communities with the capacity and tools to prepare resilience plans for a range of human-made and natural threats. In order to make the research relevant and easily digestible for local planners and leaders, an index system was developed to identify and compare counties based on their relative resilience and vulnerability to the country as a whole on a wide array of factors deemed important from the research. These indexes are used to map resilience and vulnerability at the county level across the United States and allow decision makers to benchmark and identify possible areas in which to focus planning efforts. The indexes rank all counties into four quadrants based on their relative resilience and vulnerability to national median scores in four main dimensions of resilient communities: social, economic, infrastructure, and environmental. Each dimension has its own set of indicators used to determine relative resilience (indicators that increase capacity for resilience) and vulnerability (indicators that are a liability for resilience) for that specific dimension. A complete list of the indicators used to formulate resilience scores in each dimension as well as a detailed explanation of the methodology used to code and normalize indicator data are available here.
The Building Regional Resilience Hub was made possible by:
