Measuring Climate Resilience

Resilience measurement has a paradox at its centre. The tools most widely used in community-level assessment capture what communities do — their preparedness behaviours, governance arrangements, and response systems. They tell us far less about what communities have: the accumulated stocks of capital on which adaptive responses ultimately depend. And they tell us almost nothing about the most critical question of all: whether those assets can be mobilised, combined, and converted under the conditions of compounding stress that climate change generates. This paper proposes an Adaptive Capital Framework for Climate Resilience (ACFCR) that integrates all three dimensions — and grounds that integration in an explicit theoretical account of how capital stocks map to resilience functions.