UN City Disaster Resilience Scorecard

What is it?

The UN City Disaster Resilience Scorecard (“the scorecard”) is a free¹ tool for cities to “baseline” their current level of resilience so that they can develop well-targeted programs to improve that resilience.  If application is repeated (for example, annually), it can also be used to track progress.

How does it work?

The scorecard is structured on the Sendai Framework’s Ten Essentials of Disaster Risk Reduction (see below). These provide the “section headings” for the scorecard.

Figure 1: The Ten Essentials of Disaster Risk Reduction

Each section contains a set of questions. Questions are scored by the user, together with notes justifying each score, and a summary spreadsheet tool is available to accumulate scores and present them as a Euler diagram (also known as a radar chart).

Figure 2: Format for Showing Scorecard Results

The Scorecard comes in two versions:

• A preliminary (short-form) version, containing about 40 questions.
• A detailed (long-form) version, containing some 120 questions.

The short-form version can be used for an “initial look” at the city’s resilience, for consensus building workshops, and as an executive summary of the long-form version.  It may require 10 days to complete including set-up and write-up time.  The long-form version is used for conducting detailed assessments and may take several weeks depending on the level of detail required.

Who should use the scorecard?

The scorecard is intended to be used by any stakeholder in a city’s resilience.  However, some Essentials require specialist expertise such as engineering, finance or planning. A typical user group might therefore consist of some combination of representatives from emergency management; mayor’s office; first responders (fire, police); engineering, planning and finance departments; public health; utilities; other city or state governments; business representatives; and community representatives.  (It is rare to have all these stakeholders from the start of the exercise).  The scorecard itself contains more details on stakeholders, under Essential 1 (Governance).

What if I have already completed another assessment or scorecard?

There are several city resilience assessment tools that a city can choose, and your city may already have used one. We believe that, with its Ten Essentials structure, the scorecard is more holistic than these other tools, and we encourage you combine it with the data you may already have gathered with the other tools, to “fill in the gaps” that the other tools may have left.

Who has used the scorecard, and with what benefits?

While user numbers have never been tracked, it is believed that at least 500 cities have used either the short-form or long-form versions, or both.   One, and often both, versions have been translated into 24 languages.  Figure 3 shows examples of results that cities have achieved with the scorecard.

Figure 3: Examples of impacts achieved by Scorecard users.

¹ The scorecard is freely available for any use whatsoever, including for-profit uses.