Assessing Community Resilience from a Sustainable Development Perspective: A Multicriteria Decision-Making Approach

Abstract

Despite the growing importance of community resilience, there remains a lack of integrated and data-driven frameworks capable of assessing resilience from a sustainable development perspective and supporting decision-making at the municipal level. To address the challenge of evaluating community resilience through an integrated framework grounded in sustainable development dimensions, this study proposes a framework for assessing community resilience through a multicriteria decision-making approach. The methodology integrates economic, environmental, social, and institutional indicators, entropy weighting, the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), and gap analysis to generate community resilience indices and identify priority areas for intervention. The framework was applied to municipalities in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, a region recently affected by large-scale climate-related disasters. The results revealed significant disparities in resilience levels among the municipalities analyzed while gap analysis enabled the identification of critical weaknesses and development priorities for each municipality. The study contributes to the resilience assessment literature by integrating sustainability dimensions, objective weighting through entropy, TOPSIS, and diagnostic gap analysis into a unified decision-support framework that provides a replicable and data-driven tool for evaluating community resilience, supporting public policy formulation, investment prioritization, and strategies aimed at strengthening sustainable and resilient communities.