Community resilience is the ability of communities and groups to adapt and thrive in response to external stressors. Building resilient communities as a strategy for population health requires assessment of personal and collective capacities alongside vulnerabilities. This report examines what quantitative and qualitative methods can be used to measure health-related community resilience at national and local levels. Evidence from a rapid review of 33 studies highlighted various methodological challenges. Measurement strategies mostly drawn from the field of community disaster resilience include population-level frameworks mixed methods assessment tools and qualitative and participatory case studies. The main conclusions are that measurement of health-related community resilience should cover multiple domains (economic social health skills political and environment) and consider local context and assets. Three stages of policy development are suggested: selection of a set of key indicators to collect data on community resilience creation of a learning network to share knowledge and tools and development of a comprehensive measurement framework.

The frequency and severity of disasters over the last few decades have presented unprecedented challenges for communities across the United States. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina exposed the complexity and breadth of a deadly combination of existing community stressors, aging infrastructure, and a powerful natural hazard. In many ways, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was a turning point for understanding and managing disasters, as well as related plan making and policy formulation. It brought the phrase "community resilience" into the lexicon of disaster management. Building and Measuring Community Resilience: Actions for Communities and the Gulf Research Program summarizes the existing portfolio of relevant or related resilience measurement efforts and notes gaps and challenges associated with them. It describes how some communities build and measure resilience and offers four key actions that communities could take to build and measure their resilience in order to address gaps identified in current community resilience measurement efforts. This report also provides recommendations to the Gulf Research Program to build and measure resilience in the Gulf of Mexico region.

Building resilience to the world’s increasingly damaging environmental hazards has become a priority. This book considers the scientific advances which have been made around the world to enhance this resilience. Although resilience is not new, it is through the idea of resilience that governments, organisations, and communities around the world are now seeking to address the rapidly increasing losses that environmental hazards cause so that fewer lives are lost, and damage is reduced. Alternative ideas and approaches have been helpful in reducing loss, but resilience offers a fresh and potentially effective means of reducing it further. Adopting a scientific approach and scientific evidence is important in applying the resilience idea in hazard mitigation. However, the science of resilience is at an immature stage of development with much discussion about the concept and how it should be understood and interpreted. Building useful theories remains a challenge although some of the building blocks of theory have been developed. More attention has been given to developing indicators and frameworks of resilience which are subsequently applied to measure resilience to hazards such as flooding, earthquake, and climate change. Environmental Hazards and Resilience: Theory and Evidence considers the scientific and theoretical challenges of making progress in applying resilience to environmental hazard mitigation and provides examples from around the world – including the USA, New Zealand, China, Bangladesh and elsewhere. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Environmental Hazards.

The 2012 National Research Council report, Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative, identified the development and use of resilience measures as critical to building resilient communities. Although many kinds of resilience measures and measuring tools have and continue to be developed, very few communities consistently use them as part of their planning or resilience building efforts. Since federal or top-down programs to build resilience often yield mixed results, bottom-up approaches are needed, but are often difficult for communities to implement alone. A major challenge for many communities in developing their own approaches to resilience measures is identifying a starting point and defining the process. Other challenges include lack of political will due to competing priorities and limited resources, finite time and staff to devote to developing resilience measures, lack of data availability and/or inadequate data sharing among community stakeholders, and a limited understanding of hazards and/or risks. Building on existing work, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine organized a workshop in July 2015 to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and information about ways to advance the development and implementation of resilience measures by and within diverse communities. Participants worked to gain a better understanding of the challenges these communities face in the pursuit of resilience and determine whether the approach used during this workshop can help guide communities in their efforts to build their own measures of resilience. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

With the half-way point in the implementation period of Health 2020 having been crossed this report reflects on the effect that the policy has had on the Region. Like its predecessors in 2012 and 2015 the 2018 report is an essential resource for the 53 Member States of the WHO European Region to report on progress towards the Health 2020 targets outlining areas that may be unfinished by 2020 and beyond. Lessons learned from across the Region on action taken by the WHO Regional Office for Europe and Member States to improve the health and well-being of their populations are presented. The report also addresses the new public health challenges that have emerged in recent years. To respond effectively to these challenges new forms of evidence are essential to measure health and well-being in different cultural and subjective contexts. This is particularly important in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals whose health indicators overlap significantly with those for Health 2020. The report will be a useful source of information for policy-makers throughout the Region helping them identify areas that need further assessment and policy action at the national level. It should inspire Member States and other stakeholders to contribute to the work under the umbrella of the WHO European Health Information Initiative: a collaboration between the Regional Office European institutions and Member States aimed at improving the information that underpins policy. Only through broad international cooperation and bold strides in the way evidence is used in the 21st century will evidence fully inform health policy-making for the benefit of all.

This book explores the communication processes of the Transition Movement, a community-led global social movement, as it was adapted in a local context. First it analyzes how the movement’s grand narratives of responding to “climate change” and creating greater “resiliency” were communicated into local community-based stories, responses, and actions in the Transition Town of Amherst, Massachusetts. Second, it seeks to understand the multilayered communication processes that facilitate these actions toward sustainable social change. Transition Amherst developed and/or supported projects that addressed reducing dependency on peak-oil, creating community-based-local economies, supporting sustainable food production and consumption, and participating in more efficient transportation, among others. The popularity of the model coincides with an increase in the interest in and use of the term “sustainability” by media, academics and policymakers around the world, and an increase in the global use of digital technology as a resource for information gathering and sharing. Thus this book situates itself at the intersections of a global environmental and economic crisis, the popularization of the term “sustainability,” and an increasingly digitized and networked global society in order to better understand how social change is contextualized and facilitated in a local community via a global network. This book is the first comprehensive analysis of the ways in which the theories of Transition are applied over an extended period of time in practice, on the ground in a Transition town.

There is a strong case today for a specific focus on mental public health and its relation to social and physical environments. From a public health perspective, we now appreciate the enormous significance of mental distress and illness as causes of disability and impairment. Stress and anxiety, and other mental illnesses are linked to risks in the environment. This book questions how and why the social and physical environment matters for mental health and psychological wellbeing in human populations. While putting forward a number of different points of view, there is a particular emphasis on ideas and research from health geography, which conceptualises space and place in ways that provide a distinctive focus on the interactions between people and their social and physical environment. The book begins with an overview of a rich body of theory and research from sociology, psychology, social epidemiology, social psychiatry and neuroscience, considering arguments concerning 'mind-body dualism', and presenting a conceptual framework for studying how attributes of 'space' and 'place' are associated with human mental wellbeing. It goes on to look in detail at how our mental health is associated with material, or physical, aspects of our environment (such as 'natural' and built landscapes), with social environments (involving social relationships in communities), and with symbolic and imagined spaces (representing the personal, cultural and spiritual meanings of places). These relationships are shown to be complex, with potential to be beneficial or hazardous for mental health. The final chapters of the book consider spaces of care and the implications of space and place for public mental health policy, offering a broader view of how mental health might be improved at the population level. With boxed case studies of specific research ideas and methods, chapter summaries and suggestions for introductory reading, this book offers a comprehensive introduction which will be valuable for students of health geography, public health, sociology and anthropology of health and illness. It also provides an interdisciplinary review of the literature, by the author and by other writers, to frame a discussion of issues that challenge more advanced researchers in these fields.

Risk communication is crucial to building community resilience and reducing risk from extreme events. True community resilience involves accurate and timely dissemination of risk information to stakeholders. This book examines the policy and science of risk communication in the digital era. Themes include public awareness of risk and public participation in risk communication and resilience building. The first half of the book focuses on conceptual frameworks, components, and the role of citizens in risk communication. The second half examines the role of risk communication in resilience building and provides an overview of some of its challenges in the era of social media. This book looks at the effectiveness of risk communication in socially and culturally diverse communities in the developed and developing world. The interdisciplinary approach bridges academic research and applied policy action. Contributions from Latin America and Asia provide insight into global risk communication at a time when digital technologies have rapidly transformed conventional communication approaches. This book will be of critical interest to policy makers, academicians, and researchers, and will be a valuable reference source for university courses that focus on emergency management, risk communication, and resilience.