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Complete your community's Readiness Assessment
The Hoosier Resilience Index Readiness Assessment provides a method for county governments and incorporated cities and towns in Indiana to evaluate their community's preparedness for climate risks, and to identify and prioritize next step actions to increase readiness.
Participating communities should identify one local official or local government employee to serve as the point of contact. Each point of contact will be responsible for collecting responses to the questions in the assessment, and submitting them through their community’s unique web address. Communities that complete and submit the Assessment will receive extreme heat readiness, extreme precipitation readiness, and floodplain land use readiness scores.
These Indiana Local Governments are Using the Readiness Assessment
In March 2021, the Environmental Resilience Institute released a report outlining the average scores, highest and lowest scoring actions, and achievements of the Indiana communities that completed the Hoosier Resilience Index Readiness Assessment between November 2019 and January 2021.
Completed Assessments
Bloomington, Clarksville, Crawford County, Culver, Dyer, Fishers, Fort Wayne, Goshen, Huntington, Lafayette, Monroe County, Noble County, Richmond, Spencer, Tippecanoe County, West Lafayette, and WhitingAssessments in Process
Logansport and Warrick CountyWhat's in the Readiness Assessment?
Each section starts with a descriptive paragraph, a list of relevant resilience principles, and a list of suggested local government departments that could be consulted to assist with the completion of the section’s questions.
There are 79 questions in the Readiness Assessment, but not all questions will be posed to every community. Participating communities will receive a set of questions that is tailored to their size, type of government, and location in relation to the floodplain.
The actions included in the Readiness Assessment are based on the traits of resilient systems, as defined by Reynolds et al. (in preparation). Resilient communities and the systems that support those communities exhibit these traits:
| Resilience Principle | Description |
|---|---|
| Diversity | Variation in system components, enabling the flexibility to adapt to changed conditions. |
| Redundancy | Functional similarity of system components, buffering against the loss of any one part (e.g., having a spare tire in your car). |
| Modularity | Degree of functional independence of system components. Modularity facilitates ease of reconstruction after damage and/or innovative system transformation. Modularity can also limit harms. |
| Connectivity | Degree of linkage of system components, promoting essential information flow. There is a tension between modularity and connectivity. |
| Regenerative Ability | Capacity to regrow or reestablish after damage. |
| Equitability | Degree of accessibility and/or fairness, promoting overall system strength. |
Use of Data
Information submitted through the Readiness Assessment and the scores received by each community will not be displayed to the public. Indiana University may use the information to study and report on resilience trends in Indiana, as well as other reasonable purposes consistent with the Environmental Resilience Institute’s mission, including use of such information in public presentations and potential grant applications. Indiana University will not publish a list of ranked communities using the information collected through the Hoosier Resilience Index. Any questions about data use can be directed to the Environmental Resilience Institute.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, Indiana University is a state agency subject to the provisions of the Indiana Open Records Law, I.C. 5-14-et-seq., and that disclosure of some or all information provided pursuant to the Readiness Assessment, and the assessment itself, may be compelled pursuant to that law. In the event that Indiana University is required by the Indiana Open Records Act, or any other law, to disclose a community’s information relating to the Readiness Assessment, Indiana University will notify the community, consult with the community regarding whether there are legitimate grounds to narrow or contest such disclosure, and only disclose that information that Indiana University, in the opinion of its legal counsel, is obligated to disclose.