Realized resilience after community flood events: A global empirical study

Flooding is a major global natural hazard, with resulting disasters disproportionately affecting communities in developing countries. Enhancing community resilience is crucial for reducing flood risk, managing impacts and ultimately protecting sustainable development gains. Yet, there is little validated empirical evidence, particularly at the community scale, of the relationship between resilience characteristics before a natural hazard-event occurs and realized resilience after it. We present real-world testing of how a community's pre-flood resilience capacities influence post-flood outcomes, using actual flood events from 66 communities in seven developing countries across the world. In doing so, we applied the Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities (FRMC) approach, a validated framework and associated tool that dynamically assesses pre-flood resilience across multiple capitals to support the design of interventions for enhancing community disaster resilience. We specifically address the question how baseline community resilience, measured by 44 indicators called ‘sources of resilience’ influences flood impacts and post-flood outcomes that are measured across six themes (assets, livelihoods, life and health, lifelines, governance, and social norms). We observed that higher levels of natural, physical, and financial capital are associated with better post-event community outcomes and reduced flood impacts, such as the prevention of fatalities and serious injuries, the protection of public and private buildings and land, and livelihood stability. Importantly, in most cases, multiple sources of resilience worked together to influence a single outcome, highlighting the multidimensional nature of disaster resilience. Hence, our results emphasize the need for a multi-faceted and dynamic approach to building community flood resilience.