BRIC Index

Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC) for Gulf Coast counties

Synopsis of the BRIC Index

“The BRIC index uses a capitals approach in providing an overall baseline assessment for monitoring existing attributes of resilience to natural hazards. Developed for both county and Census tracts level, BRIC can compare one county or census tract to another, help to understand the specific drivers of resilience for individual counties, and monitor improvements in resilience over time” (https://artsandsciences.sc.edu/geog/hvri/bric).

The general methodology of BRIC computation entails a hierarchical model where input variables from open source government sources specifically selected to represent one of the six capitals of community resilience: Social, Economic, Infrastructure/housing, Institutional, Community Capital, and Environmental capitals. Statistical testing to insure internal consistency within each capital, resulted in an overall set of 49 input variables. Due to differing measurement units (percentages, rates) each variable was standardized using linear min-max scaling where X-min/max-min) so the transformed values for each variable range from 0 (low) to 1 (high). Because the variables are scaled to the 196 counties in the Gulf Coast study region, not to all the counties in the U.S., computed scores for the study area do not necessarily match the US BRIC 2015 scores.

For each capital, the variables are averaged (there are unequal numbers of variables in each capital) to produce the capital score for each. The final BRIC scores are a total sum of the six capitals and theoretically range from 0-6 for each county, but in practice the range is narrower.