Building Community Resilience: A Proactive, Measurable, Scalable, and Comprehensive Resilience Planning and Forecasting Model

Abstract

Historically, community resilience planning has been disaster-focused, reactive, and left little room to build increased sustainability to face exponentially increasing climate change impacts. Defining sustainability and resilience as both separate and interdependent characteristics of a community presents challenges for comprehensive and scalable resilience planning frameworks. However, communities can improve their resilience and sustainability within their unique set of risks and stressors if provided a framework that accounts for their Capital Stocks and Resilience Properties, identifies critical performance gaps, grades existing resilience, helps forecast potential gains from implementation strategies, and measures progress. The authors and a team of University of Kansas Environmental Assessment program students expanded, adapted and applied an existing, comprehensive, resilience planning framework in cooperation with a rural municipality, a suburban city, and a tribal nation. The teams completed a vulnerability assessment, SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, resilience screening, peer community assessment, community resilience scoring, and developed resilience-building strategies. The result was a comprehensive, rigorous, scalable resilience assessment and planning framework with an adaptable grading and forecasting system. This expanded framework, named the Community Resilience Assessment and Forecasting Tool (CRAFT), reveals facets of resilience overlooked by traditional planning processes and proactively identifies critical improvement areas with actionable specificity, tied to performance metrics, empowering communities of every size to move toward greater resilience and sustainability.