DRRC: Baseline Indicators for Monitoring Disaster Resilience in Rural Places

美国的灾害损失继续增加，但我们对国家的灾害损失模式及其对农村和非农村地区的影响缺乏根本了解。如果政策目标是提高社区的抗灾能力，经验确定的基线是必要的起点。该项目通过一套统计和地理空间技术整合自然和社会数据集，为国家在县一级建立理论上和方法上合理的复原力指标。目标是提供一套衡量抗灾能力的量化基线指标。一旦制定了指标，将对综合指数进行验证(使用不确定性和敏感性分析)。对指标构成的统计和空间变异性的探讨确定并分析了复原力、脆弱性和灾害对农村和非农村地区的相对影响之间的关系。除了对复原力的空间分析外，该项目还确定了不同县之间复原力驱动因素的差异。这项工作有助于确定干预战略以提高复原力的机会，这些机会在农村县和非农村县之间以及在农村县内可能有很大不同。这个项目的重要性是双重的。首先，地方、州和联邦政府对社区抗灾能力有相当大的规划兴趣。目前，在衡量什么、如何衡量以及确定哪些指标最有用方面，几乎没有达成一致意见。其次，为了判断任何政策或计划的有效性，需要有一个评估的起点。该项目提供了这样一个起点，即制定跟踪复原力随时间变化的基线指标。监测指标的变化为项目评估其在增强国家-S韧性方面的成功提供了证据基础。研究小组将向县、州和国家各级的利益相关者传播结果。

Disaster losses continue to increase in the United States, yet we lack a fundamental understanding of the pattern of disaster losses for the nation and their impacts on rural and non-rural places. If a policy goal is to improve community resilience to disasters, empirically defined baselines are a necessary starting point. This project integrates physical and social datasets through a suite of statistical and geospatial techniques in the construction of theoretically based and methodologically sound indicators of resilience for the nation at the county level. The goal is to provide a set of quantitative baseline indicators for measuring disaster resilience. Once the indicators are developed, the composite index will be validated (using uncertainty and sensitivity analyses). Exploration of the statistical and spatial variability in the composition of indicators identifies and analyzes the relationship between resilience, vulnerability, and the relative impact of disasters on rural and non-rural places. In addition to spatial analyses of resilience, the project identifies differences in the drivers of resilience among counties. This work helps identify opportunities for intervention strategies to improve resilience, opportunities that may be dramatically different between rural and non-rural counties and within rural counties as well. The importance of this project is twofold. First, there is considerable local, state, and federal programmatic interest in community disaster resilience. At present, there is little agreement on what to measure, how to measure it, and in determining which metrics are the most useful. Second, in order to judge the effectiveness of any policy or program, there needs to be a starting point for assessments. This project provides just such a starting point with the development of baseline indicators for tracking changes in resilience over time. Monitoring changes in the indicators provides the evidentiary basis for programs to gauge their success in enhancing the nation?s resilience. The research team will disseminate results to stakeholders at county, state, and national levels.