Resourcefulness quantification for resilient infrastructures and communities

Resources availability during disaster events is one of the primary criteria for communities to achieve a high resilience level. This thesis introduces a Resourcefulness index, reasoning on the theoretical framework and relevant indicators, which include issues apparently impossible to evaluate, as heterogeneity of economic sectors, government fragility, trust and creativity. After having explored the state of the art about the construction of composite indicators, we have selected the most proper methods to input missing data, normalize, assign weights and finally aggregate indicators to calculate the Resourcefulness index. The methodology has been applied using as case studies the entire United States and Italy, computing their Resourcefulness index and, above all, checking the consistency between the results and the theoretical framework. Encouraging results shown by the methodology pave the way for its implementation in communities’ resilience frameworks to point out weaknesses of communities which display low resilience and to guide policymakers.