Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

107 which in turn contain other systems, measuring the success of resilience-increasing activities poses a particular challenge. However, measurement is of great importance in order to be able to govern and steer the adaptation and transformation process. Every city has its specific context and needs, and its exposure to risk and vulnerability is dynamic and changes over time [8]. However, it is important to develop measurable indicators for different reasons. Indicators enable monitoring of the resilience-building process, as they provide regular and impartial feedback. They build an evidence base and make resilience more tangible for decision and policy makers as well as society at large. Furthermore, indicators can help to govern and steer the transformation process because they help to structure the new field of urban climate resilience. Clear indicators are not only important for the general measurement of resilience, but also for the analysis of whether adaptation measures were effective and whether the expected results were achieved [14]. Indicators also contribute to the credibility, transparency and accountability of the measures implemented. This in turn is very important for local policy makers to support further adaptation measures. However, the development of indicators in this context poses particular challenges. In addition to the conceptual challenges of urban climate resilience, context specificity represents another challenge for the development of resilience indicators. Consequently, it is very important to consider how to include context specificity in the indicator set. Another fundamental consideration is in regard to the context-specific, dynamic and ever-changing nature of risk and vulnerability [8]. MONARES (monitoring of adaptation measures and climate resilience in cities), a project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), was initiated in order to address the main challenges of (1) developing a consistent understanding of resilience for both practitioners and academia, (2) shaping the adaptation and transformation process into a transparent process of governing and steering and (3) the use of resilience and adaptation measurements. The aim of MONARES is to create application- oriented methodologies for monitoring and evaluating local adaptation measures. As we are focusing on the special needs for cities in Germany, we are working together with 14 other projects of the funding initiative “Climate resilience through action in cities and regions” of the BMBF, who are focusing on climate change adaptation measures and urban resilience, as well as doing on-the-ground research in municipalities across Germany. These projects and cities differ considerably concerning scale (street, district, city, suburbs and region), inhabitants and type of adaptation measure (e.g., planning, physical infrastructure, capacity building or greening). Important commonalities of the projects are their interdisciplinary approach, the aim to enhance urban climate resilience and that they conduct on-the-ground research. However, the projects test many different pathways to improve resilience, and MONARES is focusing on how to measure the success and impact of these different projects and activities with a common set of indicators. In order to ensure applicability, we began to involve the projects at an early stage of our research. The first key step (Figure 1 Phase 1) before developing the indicators was to develop a framework [15] to describe urban resilience. Based on 19 frameworks described in the literature [16, 17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34], our first draft was developed, which then was modified together with the projects. This process was indispensable as it resulted in a definition of urban resilience that is suitable for all projects so that there was agreement on common basic principles. Based on steps 1 to 3 as shown in Figure 1, the final definition of urban resilience in MONARES is as follows: The climate resilience of a city depends on the ability of its sub-systems to anticipate the consequences of extreme weather and climate change, to resist the negative consequences of these events and to recover essential functions after disturbance quickly, as well as to learn from these events and to adapt to the consequences of climate change in the short and medium term, and transform in the long term. The more pronounced these abilities are, the more resilient a city is to the consequences of climate change. All abilities are important. Based on this preliminary work, a four-step mixed-method approach (Figure 1 Phases 4–7) was designed to develop the indicators for urban climate resilience on which this paper focuses.