In a recent blog post, we explored the concept of “social vulnerability” to natural disasters such as extreme weather events– the idea that various populations may have functional needs in the case of emergencies depending on who and where they are. But communities also possess assets and attributes that can make them more capable of recovering after a disaster. This is the idea of “community resilience” and will be the topic of this post, the second in our series marking September as National Preparedness Month.
A good community resilience measure would take into account how prepared a community is for a disaster, how likely a community is to band together after a catastrophe, and how quickly its economy could be rebuilt. One available community resilience measure—not coincidentally the one utilized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as a component of its National Risk Index—is the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC) Index constructed by researchers at the University of South Carolina. This index is applied at the county level[1] and covers 50 indicators[2] across six dimensions of community resilience.
The BRIC index is simultaneously a useful tool and a case study into the need to dig beyond the top line results into how an index is constructed.[3] Let’s look at the 2020 BRIC index to see how Georgia counties and the Atlanta region stack up, then explore the six individual dimensions that comprise the final score. The maps below use quintiles based on the scores of all U.S. counties,[4] with darker green equating to a higher resiliency score.
Figure 1: Overall BRIC Index Score by Nationwide Quintile
Data Source: Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities, County Composite BRIC Scores for 2020
While we observed in the previous post that the Atlanta region enjoyed relatively low levels of social vulnerability compared with the rest of the state, it does not fare as well in terms of community resilience as measured by the BRIC Index. None of the counties in our region– and only two counties in the entire state– rank among the 20% most resilient counties in the nation. That Chatham (Savannah) and Glynn (Brunswick and St. Simons Island) counties would rank high on the resiliency index is somewhat surprising, given how Georgia’s coastline is vulnerable to hurricanes and storm surges. Among counties in the Atlanta region, Fayette and Henry clock in as the most resilient, while Clayton and Gwinnett counties have the lowest overall resilience scores.
Let’s dig a bit deeper into the six dimensions of community resilience found in the BRIC Index to understand our scores a bit better.
The first dimension is social resilience, which is concerned with needs and capabilities of the population: how much of the population is capable of working; access to vehicles and phones; access to food and medical care.[5] Figure 2 presents the spatial aspect of social resilience in Georgia:
Figure 2: BRIC Social Resilience Score by Nationwide Quintile
Data Source: Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities, County Composite BRIC Scores for 2020
This map shows that the Atlanta region fares reasonably well on the social resilience dimension: six of our eleven counties (Cherokee, Cobb, Fayette, Forsyth, Fulton and Henry) fall within the top 20% most socially resilient counties in the nation. Of the remaining counties, all are in the second quintile except for Clayton, which falls in the fourth quintile.
Figure 3 shows economic resilience, which measures indicators like homeownership, employment rate, and level of independence from sectors (such as tourism and agriculture) that are heavily impacted by natural disasters.[6]
Figure 3: BRIC Economic Resilience Score by Nationwide Quintile
Data Source: Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities, County Composite BRIC Scores for 2020
As this map shows, the Atlanta region also scores well on this dimension. Nine of our eleven counties rank in the top 20% of economic resilience; Cherokee and DeKalb fall in the second quintile. It is curious, though, that some of the counties on the coast with heavy tourism rank as well as they do.
The third dimension of resilience, depicted in figure 4, is community capital. This measure focuses on ties that people have to the local community. This includes attributes such as length of residence, voter turnout, and numbers of religious and civic organizations. [7]
Figure 4: BRIC Community Capital Score by Nationwide Quintile
Data Source: Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities, County Composite BRIC Scores for 2020
As a region that has grown rapidly through in-migration, it should come as no surprise that our community capital score would be low. As shown in this map, nine of our eleven counties rank in the bottom 20% of counties statewide on this dimension. The lone exceptions are Fayette and Henry counties, which fall in the fourth quartile.
Figure 5 depicts institutional resilience, the fourth dimension of the BRIC Index. This includes measures of spending on hazard mitigation projects, government/jurisdictional fragmentation, and flood insurance coverage.[8] This dimension also includes crop insurance per square mile as a measure. To be sure, such a measure is useful for rural areas, but not really applicable to the Metro Atlanta region, which has little agricultural activity.[9]
Figure 5: BRIC Institutional Resilience Score by Nationwide Quintile
Data Source: Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities, County Composite BRIC Scores for 2020
As this map shows, counties in the Atlanta region show room for improvement on the institutional dimension; all eleven counties fall in either the second or third quintile. Some of this can be attributed to the amount of political and jurisdictional fragmentation– with the recent incorporation of Mableton and Mulberry, we now have 76 cities in our 11-county region. But the region can also likely invest more in mitigation spending and encouraging people to purchase flood insurance through education and outreach.
The fifth dimension, housing/infrastructure resilience, focuses on items like sturdier housing (i.e., not mobile homes), availability of temporary housing, availability of medical care, and infrastructure such as highways and railroads needed for evacuation and resupply. But it is also worth noting that the housing construction quality is a fairly weak proxy, based on year of construction. This dimension is depicted in figure 6.[10]
Figure 6: BRIC Housing/Infrastructure Resilience Score by Nationwide Quintile
Data Source: Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities, County Composite BRIC Scores for 2020
This map reveals wide variation within the Atlanta region on infrastructural resilience: Fulton and DeKalb counties score among the top 20% nationwide; five additional counties (Cherokee, Clayton, Cobb, Forsyth, and Henry) are in the second quintile, Gwinnett and Douglas are in the third quintile, and Fayette and Rockdale are in the fourth quintile.
Finally, Figure 7 depicts the sixth dimension. Environmental resilience includes components such as locally grown food, pervious surfaces for drainage, and efficient water use.[11]
Figure 7: BRIC Environmental Resilience Score by Nationwide Quintile
Data Source: Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities, County Composite BRIC Scores for 2020
This is a dimension where the Atlanta metro counties score quite low, as our entire region falls in the bottom 20% of counties nationwide.
To sum up, the 11-county Atlanta metro region has a mixed bag in terms of community resilience per the BRIC Index in face of a natural disaster. We score well on some dimensions like economic and social resilience, but have room to improve in others like institutional and environmental resilience. At the same time, it is important to dig into the individual components to understand specific ways to boost our resiliency but also to regard with skepticism items that are not relevant to our region.
In the next post, we’ll look at measures of risk posed by natural disasters. In the meantime, why not make a home disaster plan and be ready in case of emergency?
Notes:
[1] This lack of geographic granularity is not necessarily a bad thing. While it is desirable for a vulnerability index to be at as small a geographic unit as possible (so as to pinpoint where populations in need are located), it makes sense to look at a larger community when measuring its resilience.
[2] The BRIC website says that there are 49 components, but the indicator list has 50 entries. The difference is likely in whether you consider the two “Business Size” measures as one component (because they are measuring the same thing) or two (because there are two separate indicators).
[3] Unfortunately, the authors of the BRIC Index do not provide the data for the individual indicators, only the overall index score and sub-scores for the six major dimensions. We therefore cannot always explore why areas scored low or high on a particular dimension as we did in the previous post in this series when discussing the SVI.
[4] As the name implies, quintiles divide your data into five equal-sized categories. So, the top quintile would be the 20% most resilient counties.
[5] The social resilience dimension contains measures of educational attainment, measured as the percentage of the population with college education or higher; pre-retirement age, measured as the percentage of the population between ages 15 and 65; transportation access, measured as the percentage of households with at least one vehicle available; communication capacity, measured as the percentage of households with telephone service available; English language competency, measured as the percentage of the population who are proficient English speakers; non-special needs, measured as the percent of the population without a sensory, physical, or mental disability; health insurance, measured as the percentage of the population under age 65 with health insurance (ages 65 and over are generally covered by Medicare, hence the focus on the other ages); mental health support, measured as the number of psychosocial support facilities per capita; food provisioning capacity, measured as the food security rate (as modeled by Feeding America); and physician access, measured as the number of physicians per capita.
[6] Economic resilience is comprised of the following factors: homeownership rate; employment rate; race/ethnicity income equality, measured with the Gini Index; non-dependence on primary/tourism sectors, measured as the percentage of employees in sectors other than farming, fishing, forestry, extractive industry, and tourism; gender income equality, measured as the percent absolute difference between male and female median income divided by
annual income; two business size measures: the ratio of large to small businesses and the ratio of employees to establishments; large retail-regional/national geographic distribution, measured as the number of large retail stores per capita; federal employment, measured as the percentage of the labor force employed by the federal government; and energy burden, measured as the percentage of income spent on energy costs. The income inequality and energy burden measures are “inverted” or flipped so that higher values reflect higher resilience levels.
[7] The community capital dimension contains measures of: non-recent immigrants, measured as the percentage of the population who have lived in the US for at least 5 years (including native born); native state residents, measured as the percentage of the population born in the state of current residence; political engagement, measured as the percentage of the voting age population participating in the most recent presidential election; religious organizations, measured as the number of religious organizations per capita; civic organizations, measured as the number of civic organizations per capita; and disaster volunteerism, measured as the number of AmeriCorps volunteers per capita.
[8] The institutional resilience dimension includes measures of the following: mitigation spending, measured as the 10-year average per capita spending for mitigation projects; flood insurance coverage, measured as the percentage of housing units covered by the National Flood Insurance Program; two measures of “performance regimes”: distance from county seat to the state capital and distance from county seat to the nearest county seat within a Metropolitan Statistical Area; political and jurisdictional fragmentation, measured as the number of governments and special districts per 10,000 persons; disaster aid experience, measured as the number of Presidential Disaster Declarations divided by the of loss-causing hazard events for 10-year period; local disaster training, measured as the percentage of population in communities covered by FEMA Citizen Corps programs; population stability, measured as the population change over previous 5-year period; nuclear plant accident planning, measured as the percentage of the population within 10 miles of a nuclear plant (because nuclear plants are required to disseminate emergency and evacuation plans to people living within that distance of the facility); and crop insurance coverage, measured as the number of crop insurance policies per square mile. The distance, fragmentation, and population change measures are “inverted” or flipped so that higher values reflect higher resilience levels.
[9] According to the 2024 American Community Survey 5-year estimates, only about 0.3% of the 11-county ARC region is employed in agriculture, forestry, fishing/hunting, and mining industries.
[10] The housing/infrastructural resilience component includes: sturdier housing types, measured as the percentage of housing units that are not mobile homes; temporary housing availability, measured as the percentage of vacant housing units available for rent; medical care capacity, measured as the number of hospital beds per capita; evacuation routes, measured as road intersection density; housing stock construction quality, measured as the percentage of housing units built prior to 1970 or after 2000; temporary shelter availability, measured by the number of hotels and motels per capita; school restoration potential, measured by the number of public schools per capita; industrial re-supply potential, measured as the number of rail miles per square mile; and high-speed internet infrastructure, measured as the percentage of the population with access to broadband Internet.
[11] Environmental resilience includes measures of: local food suppliers, measured as the number of farms marketing products through community supported agriculture per capita; natural flood buffers, measured as the percentage of land in wetlands; efficient energy use, measured as the number of megawatt hours per energy consumer; pervious surfaces, measured by average percent perviousness (using the U.S. Geological Service’s National Land Cover Database); and efficient water use, measured by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Water Supply Stress Index. The energy use and water supply stress measures are “inverted” or flipped so that higher values reflect higher resilience levels.