🌍 How can we measure community resilience to disasters—and why are numbers alone not enough?
I am pleased to share our new scientific article, published in the international journal Open Geosciences, by De Gruyter Brill:
📘 Theoretical Evolution of Measuring Community Resilience to Natural and Technological Disasters: Past, Present, and Future – Empirical Insights from Qualitative Research in Serbia
The article was published in a journal indexed in Web of Science – SCIE and Scopus, with a Journal Impact Factor of 1.3, a five-year Impact Factor of 1.7, and a CiteScore of 3.1.
At a time when communities are increasingly exposed to floods, wildfires, extreme weather events, industrial accidents, and other complex risks, the central question is no longer simply:
How quickly can we recover?
It is also:
Can we learn, adapt, and become more resilient after every crisis?
In this study, we examine the evolution of resilience measurement—from traditional engineering models focused on stability and returning to a previous state, to contemporary approaches that incorporate social, institutional, economic, infrastructural, and cultural dimensions.
A particularly valuable contribution of the study is the empirical evidence from Serbia, based on interviews with 19 experienced disaster risk management professionals and local-level practitioners.
The findings highlight several major challenges:
🔹 a gap between formal strategies and their practical implementation;
🔹 an insufficiently developed culture of prevention;
🔹 limited institutional coordination;
🔹 inadequate citizen participation;
🔹 strong dependence of local communities on central authorities.
One of the article’s most important conclusions is that community resilience cannot be reduced to statistics, indices, and quantitative indicators alone.
Trust in institutions, solidarity, local knowledge, social cohesion, informal support networks, and the capacity to learn from previous crises often determine the real level of resilience more accurately than formally adopted plans.
For this reason, we see the future of resilience measurement in combining:
quantitative precision + qualitative understanding + the lived experience of local communities.
I believe this article can be valuable not only to the academic community, but also to policymakers, local governments, civil protection authorities, and all professionals working to build safer and more resilient societies.
My sincere thanks to my co-authors Dalibor Milenković, Tin Lukić, and Renate Renner for their excellent collaboration, expertise, and shared commitment to this important research topic.
🔗 The article is available in open access:
https://doi.org/10.1515/geo-2025-0968
Resilience is not built when a disaster begins. It is built years in advance—through knowledge, trust, coordination, and responsibility.
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