Measuring Community Resilience to Multiple Climate Hazards: The CRMC Approach and Australian Experience

Climate change is intensifying compound and cascading disasters, yet conventional assessment frameworks focused on single hazards, while being methodologically and practically more straightforward, often fail to capture the systemic, interdependent dynamics that shape community climate resilience. There is an urgent need for robust and practical methods to assess resilience across multiple hazards at the community scale, where climate impacts are felt most strongly and where much investment in improving resilience is needed.

This presentation showcases the Climate Resilience Measurement for Communities (CRMC), developed by the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance, an innovative framework that addresses this critical gap. The CRMC has evolved from its origins as a single-hazard Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities - where it was applied in over 400 communities globally -  to become the first community-level tool to holistically assess resilience to multiple climate hazards in parallel, currently including floods, heatwaves, wildfires and storms. The framework takes a systemic approach, measuring 26 general resilience indicators plus hazard-specific indicators across five domains: human, social, natural, physical and financial capitals. Crucially, the CRMC is explicitly designed to identify co-benefits across hazards and avoid unintended consequences.

We will share new research from Fire to Flourish (Monash University), which partnered with the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance to develop the wildfire layer of the CRMC and apply it in eight regional Australian communities. This is the first holistic, systems-based measurement of community wildfire resilience. Five communities were assessed for both wildfire and flood resilience, demonstrating multi-hazard assessment functionality and enabling direct comparison of how communities fare across different hazards and identification of general versus hazard-specific resilience gaps. These CRMC assessments provided actionable evidence for community-level decision-making and prioritisation, enabling measurement of resilience changes over time, and integrated stakeholder engagement through participatory data collection directly with community members. It facilitates learning between hazards within the same measurement process, revealing how strengths in resilience to one hazard can inform strategies for others.

Strong patterns emerged across the assessments, revealing systemic strengths in community preparedness and hazard awareness, alongside critical gaps in long-term planning, investment in critical infrastructure, and the responsiveness of emergency planning to local people and place. The multi-hazard assessments revealed that communities often scored better on specific hazard responses than on general resilience measures such as energy, communication and transport systems, highlighting the importance of these foundational systems for overall resilience. Importantly, the process of measurement itself built resilience through learning and community engagement.

This work demonstrates that systemic resilience to multiple hazards can be meaningfully measured at community scale to inform local priorities, support systems change, and guide investment in climate-resilient development.