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Advancing resilience measurement

Nature Sustainability volume 4, pages 288–289 (2021)Cite this article

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To the Editor — Resilience has rapidly risen to the top of the agenda for sustainability and development1. The concept underpins a number of high-level policy initiatives, including the Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Agreement. In the face of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and with billions of dollars’ worth of resilience investments being mobilized globally, resilience will continue to rise as a policy priority. The scale of these investments further amplifies the importance of resilience and highlights the need for rigorous and decision-oriented evidence. Under these conditions, we believe that current measurement approaches can do more to serve the learning, evaluation and accountability needs of resilience stakeholders.

Efforts to measure resilience face conceptual and methodological hurdles2. Resilience has differing entry points, definitions and applications across disciplines. Many sustainability scholars and practitioners draw on frameworks that have roots in socio–ecological systems (SES)3. These typically share a commitment to understanding how and why individuals and/or systems cope, adapt and potentially transform in response to disturbance4. While research on SES has infused new perspectives into development practice, including systems thinking and complexity5, conceptual diversity continues to limit efforts at standardizing metrics. As a result, the number of resilience measurement approaches has risen rapidly, with many stakeholders struggling to match their evidence needs with suitable tools6.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

    Lindsey Jones

  2. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Mark A. Constas

  3. Global Resilience Partnership, Stockholm, Sweden

    Nathanial Matthews & Simone Verkaart

Authors
  1. Lindsey Jones
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  2. Mark A. Constas
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  3. Nathanial Matthews
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  4. Simone Verkaart
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Correspondence to Lindsey Jones.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Sustainability thanks the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Jones, L., A. Constas, M., Matthews, N. et al. Advancing resilience measurement. Nat Sustain 4, 288–289 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-00642-x

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