Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

109 Table 1. Dimensions and action field of the resilience framework. As we have the aim to develop a user-friendly, applicable and transparent indicator set, we firstly reduced the indicators to two indicators per action-field. The two most important selection criteria were (1) context specificity of industrial nations, especially Germany, and (2) data availability. Context specificity is important because many of the indicators in the literature are suitable for the context of the Global South but not for the Global North, and even indicators that might be suitable for the Global North might not be suitable in the German context. The second criteria—data availability—is therefore important because municipalities have, on the one hand, good access to a lot of data but have, on the other hand, resource problems regarding time, finances and human resources. Action fields without literature-based indicators required the development of new ideas within the project. Given the available data, some action fields were difficult to measure without significantly neglecting the complexity of the action field. 2.2. Survey to Assimilate the Indicators for Context Specificity Based on the literature review (see Figure 1 Phase 4) and the described selection process, an online-survey was developed (see Figure 1 Phase 5). The survey was used because, given that the indicators should be transparent and user-friendly, not only the scientific background is important, but a clear understanding of the indicators in the broad community is important also. The survey was sent to all persons who are working in one of the 14 projects mentioned above. 39 people answered the survey. Themain aimof the surveywas tomeasure howparticipants assess the different indicators. They were requested to rate the importance of every indicator regarding urban climate resilience on a scale from one (low importance) to five (high importance). Each action field was represented by at least one indicator (Table 1). Besides the rating of indicators, the survey consisted of four chapters: First, some general background; Second, the context of urban climate resilience; Thirdly, the indicators; Fourthly, the possibility of extending the set of indicators by indicators without existing data sources, and some final remarks.