Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities

A social vulnerability index measures susceptibility to harm — the characteristics that make populations more likely to suffer losses. BRIC measures resilience — the standing capacities that help a community absorb a shock and recover — and is explicitly multidimensional, adding economic, institutional, infrastructural, community-capital, and environmental dimensions to social factors. The two are related but not simple opposites: a place can be both highly vulnerable on some social indicators and resilient on others. BRIC is designed as a resilience benchmark, not merely an inverted vulnerability score.

Equal weighting is a deliberate choice under uncertainty. There is no consensus evidence on how much more one resilience driver matters than another, and weights estimated from a single past disaster would likely not generalize. Equal weights are transparent, easy to communicate, and avoid overfitting. Cutter, Ash, and Emrich adopt equal weighting within and across the six subindices, while recommending sensitivity analysis so users understand how much rankings depend on this assumption.

Not directly. BRIC characterizes inherent, pre-event resilience — the conditions already in place — rather than forecasting the trajectory of any particular event, which also depends on the hazard's magnitude, warning, response, and aid. Empirically, baseline resilience tends to correlate with better recovery outcomes, so BRIC is informative, but it is best used as a planning and benchmarking tool and paired with event-specific recovery or loss models when prediction is the goal.