Assessing community resilience: mapping the community rating system (CRS) against the 6C-4R frameworks

ABSTRACT This paper introduces an holistic approach to assessing community resilience in the United States with respect to hazards by inventorying a community's strengths: Financial, Human, Natural, Physical, Political and Social, as sources of capital (6 Capitals, or 6Cs) and characterizing four properties of its resilience (4R) (robustness, resourcefulness, redundancy and rapidity). We link the 6C-4R framework to the National Flood Insurance Program's (NFIP) Community Rating System (CRS). There is a positive correlation between the 6C-4R framework and the CRS, demonstrating the extent to which that system might therefore be used to measure resilience holistically in an effective and efficient manner. We also provide illustrative examples of resilience strategies linked to the 6C-4R framework that were adopted by Ottawa, Illinois, Birmingham, Alabama and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, USA, the last being a community that joined the CRS in 2010 following a severe flood in 2008. The CRS does not cover all the aspects of a community's status and activities so in order to make informed decisions and prioritize the implementation of resilience-improving activities, community-wide cost–benefit analyses of CRS activities would be useful in the future as inputs for further developing a strategy for reducing future flood losses.

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