Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities

The Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC) is a composite-index method, introduced by Susan Cutter, Christopher Burton, and Christopher Emrich in 2010, for benchmarking the inherent, pre-event resilience of places to hazards and disasters. Rather than measuring how a community actually performed after a specific event, BRIC measures the standing conditions — social, economic, community-capital, institutional, infrastructural, and environmental — that theory and evidence link to a community's capacity to prepare for, absorb, and recover from shocks. Indicators are normalized, sign-corrected so that higher always means more resilient, averaged within each dimension into subindices, and summed into a single comparable score for every place. The 2014 refinement standardized the dimensions and demonstrated the index across all U.S. counties, making BRIC one of the most widely used baseline resilience metrics in disaster studies.