Abstract

In recent years, building disaster resilient communities has become a primary objective of crisis management institutions across the globe, as a resilient community is likely to suffer fewer losses and recover more quickly when faced with an adverse event. However, in order to strengthen a community’s resilience, one needs to first establish a baseline, an initial measure that can be used to compare communities and to track changes over time. This article presents such a baseline, a community resilience index, for Norway. Following the approach outlined by the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC), the article constructs a hierarchical index, using 47 indicators divided into six subdomains, to describe the resilience capacities of the Norwegian municipalities. The results show considerable variations in the relative levels of resilience. Most markedly, there seems to be a north-south divide; i.e., many of the northern municipalities having lower levels of overall resilience and many of the southern municipalities having higher levels of overall resilience. These initial observations are further analysed by deconstructing the overall index into its components to identify driving forces behind the overall resilience score. To validate the results, the resilience scores are compared to previously established vulnerability metrics. The resilience and vulnerability metrics are then used to identify potential low-risk (high resilience, low vulnerability) and high-risk (low resilience, high vulnerability) areas across Norway.