Degree and direction of overlap between social vulnerability and community resilience measurements

Abstract

An ongoing debate in academic and practitioner communities, centers on the measurement similarities and differences between social vulnerability and community resilience. More specifically, many see social vulnerability and community resilience measurements as conceptually and empirically the same. Only through a critical and comparative assessment can we ascertain the extent to which these measurement schemas empirically relate to one another. This paper uses two well-known indices—the social vulnerability index (SoVI) and the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC) to address the topic. The paper employs spatio-temporal correlations to test for differences or divergence (negative associations) and similarities or convergence (positive associations), and the degree of overlap. These tests use continental U.S. counties, two timeframes (2010 and 2015), and two case study sub-regions (to identify changes in measurement associations going from national to regional scales given the place-based nature of each index). Geospatial analytics indicate a divergence with little overlap between SoVI and BRIC measurements, based on low negative correlation coefficients (around 30%) for both time periods. There is some spatial variability in measurement overlap, but less than 2% of counties show hot spot clustering of correlations of more than 50% in either year. The strongest overlap and divergence in both years occurs in few counties in California, Arizona, and Maine. The degree of overlap in measurements at the regional scale is greater in the Gulf Region (39%) than in the Southeast Atlantic region (21% in 2010; 28% in 2015) suggesting more homogeneity in Gulf Coast counties based on population and place characteristics. However, in both study areas SoVI and BRIC measurements are negatively associated. Given their inclusion in the National Risk Index, both social vulnerability and resilience metrics are needed to interpret the local community capacities in natural hazards risk planning, as a vulnerable community could be highly resilient or vice versa.