Definition of Community Resilience

WHAT IS RESILIENCE?

The capability to anticipate risk, limit impact, and bounce back rapidly through survival, adaptability, evolution, and growth in the face of turbulent change.

When a community is truly resilient, it should be able to avoid the cascading system failures to help minimize any disaster's disruption to everyday life and the local economy.  A resilient community is not only prepared to help prevent or minimize the loss or damage to life, property and the environment, but also it has the ability to quickly return citizens to work, reopen businesses, and restore other essential services needed for a full and swift economic recovery.

We took as our basis a simple economic rationale:  communities have a quantifiable level of functional capacity.  In a situation such as a natural or man-made disaster that capacity declines at a rate and to a depth that is largely dependent on the nature of the disruption, the community's level of preparedness for that specific disruption, and the rapidity and effectiveness of that response.  More importantly, the recovery rate from the disruption largely depends on those same factors.  

CARRI has conducted an examination of literature to identify definitions of resilience; from that examination an analysis has been preapred and is found in the following document. Please note the information found here does not represent an exhaustive list of definitions.  CARRI Definitions