A Proposed Indicator Framework for Diagnosing Disaster Resilience in Local Governments

Ensuring effective safety management in the face of intensifying climate-driven and complex disasters calls for the development of an objective diagnostic system for assessing disaster resilience. This study presents a disaster resilience indicator framework that can enable local governments to assess resilience levels and support evidence-based policymaking. Based on resilience theory and the disaster resilience of place model, the study proposes a four-tier hierarchical framework integrating disaster management policy stages with resilience attributes. The framework consists of four policy stages—prevention, damage minimization, recovery, and “Build Back Better” (BBB)—and eight corresponding attributes: vulnerability, robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness, rapidity, completeness, equity, and innovation. The framework is further operationalized into 26 sub-categories and 165 candidate indicators across seven dimensions. By aligning resilience attributes with policy stages, the framework enables stage-specific diagnosis and direct linkage to policy interventions. The inclusion of BBB as an independent category also captures transformative resilience beyond recovery. The 165 indicators are proposed as a candidate pool to be refined through expert validation and weighting in subsequent research. This study provides a conceptual framework and candidate indicator pool to support the development of a standardized disaster resilience diagnostic system for local governments.