The Resilience Warrant of Fitness Research Programme: Towards a method for applying the New Zealand Resilience Index in a regional context

Abstract

The New Zealand Resilience Index (NZRI) has been developed by researchers as a way of providing a repeatable, quantitative measure of community hazard resilience, to allow the standardised benchmarking and monitoring of disaster resilience across New Zealand. If used appropriately, it can also be used to help target interventions that improve resilience.

Consideration of the way decision-makers would like to use assessments like a resilience index is an often-neglected component of the construction and refinement of such tools. Without user consultation, there is a risk of producing a tool that is interesting but impractical for those designing and implementing resilience intervention programmes and allocating funding to disaster risk reduction and resilience activities. The Resilience Assessment WOF was designed to ‘road test’ and refine the NZRI through a community case study and to develop a framework for general use, while adding value to resilience planning in a partner community. The purpose of this report is to describe the application of the NZRI to a regional context.