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Climate-related disaster impacts, such as loss of human life as its most severe consequence, have been rising globally. Some studies attribute this increase to population growth, while others point to climate change as the primary cause. However, empirical evidence linking climate change to disaster impacts remains limited, particularly in the Global South. This study addresses the impact attribution question in Nepal, a low-income and highly disaster-prone country. We applied a robust regression-based method that accounts for the role of hazard, exposure and vulnerability in flood and landslide mortality, using subnational scale empirical data from 1992 to 2021. Historically, flood and landslide mortality has been highest in central and eastern Nepal due to the stronger influence of the Indian monsoon. However, disaster impacts have surged in recent years in western Nepal, driven largely by an increase in extreme precipitation events. For example, a one standardized unit increase in maximum one-day precipitation increases flood mortality by 33%, and heavy rain days increases landslide mortality by 45%. In contrast, a one standardized unit increase in per capita income reduces landslide and flood mortality by 30% and 45%, respectively. While reductions in vulnerability have helped lower disaster mortality, population exposure has not played a significant role. Therefore, the rise in flood and landslide mortality, particularly in western Nepal, is primarily attributable to the increase in precipitation extremes linked to climate change. With climate change expected to further intensify such extremes, disaster mortality is likely to increase unless significant efforts are made to reduce vulnerability.

Anthropogenic climate change is already causing dangerous and widespread disruptions in global ecological and social systems and affects the lives of billions of people around the world. Even with scaled-up risk management and adaptation, the limits of adaptation will often be reached. Currently, very little is known about the degree to which societies can adapt to climate change, and where and when limits to adaptation will be reached. In this paper, we conceptualize adaptation limits through a novel methodological framework, assess adaptation limits along adaptation pathways, and propose a research strategy for empirical and model-based limits assessments based on biophysical and socio-economic data. Assessing limits is central to national and international adaptation policymaking. More efficient adaptation can also help climate mitigation efforts.

Every year, 30–70% of Bangladesh is inundated with flood waters, which combined with erosion, affect between 10 and 70 million people annually. Rural riverine communities in Bangladesh have long been identified as some of the poorest populations, most vulnerable to riverine hazards. However, these communities have, for generations, also developed resilience strategies – considered as the combination of absorptive, adaptive, and transformative approaches – to manage significant flooding and erosion. It is not clear whether such existing strategies are sufficient to generate resilience in the face of increasing hazards and growing pressures for land. In this study, we quantify community resilience to flooding and erosion of 35 of the most poverty-stricken and exposed communities in riverine Bangladesh by applying the systematic resilience measurement framework provided by the Flood Resilience Measurement for Communities tool. The low levels of resilience observed in the riverine communities, as well as their continued focus on enhancing absorptive capacities are alarming, especially in the face of growing climate threats and continued population growth. Innovative transformative responses are urgently required in riverine Bangladesh, which align with and complement ongoing community-centred efforts to enhance rural resilience to riverine hazards.

A loss and damage (L&D) fund has been established to support particularly vulnerable developing countries. L&D funding needs, entitlements and necessary contributions can be quantified using climate economics coupled with historical responsibility principles; for the year 2025, total L&D funding needs are estimated to be US $395 [128–937] billion.

Disasters associated with natural hazards as well as climate change are happening within complex socio-economic systems and desired system states, including sustainable development and resource management, are formulated on the global as well as regional and national levels. However, complex system approaches are yet only rudimentarily incorporated in related applications, and we discuss modeling as well as policy challenges focusing on fiscal risk. As an intermediate step we suggest a gap approach which we relate to fiscal stress levels a complex system may experience due to natural hazard events. We argue that in case of no gaps one can assume a no stress situation and therefore modeling of disruptions including cascading effects is less necessary. However, at the same time we also acknowledge that there is an urgent need to address corresponding challenges with complex system methods. Policy-wise our paper responds to concerns for real-world applications and can provide insights to support current discussions within the UNFCCC and Paris Agreement around both adaptation finance and the new funding arrangements for loss and damage from climate impacts established at COP27.

Modelling complex interactions involving climatic features, socio-economic vulnerability or responses, and long impact transmissions is associated with substantial uncertainty. Physical climate storylines are proposed as an approach to explore complex impact transmission pathways and possible alternative unfoldings of event cascades under future climate conditions. These storylines are particularly useful for climate risk assessment for complex domains, including event cascades crossing multiple disciplinary or geographical borders. For an effective role in climate risks assessments, development guidelines are needed to consistently develop and interpret the storyline event analyses. This paper elaborates on the suitability of physical climate storyline approaches involving climate event induced shocks propagating into societal impacts. It proposes a set of common elements to construct the event storylines. In addition, criteria for their application for climate risk assessment are given, referring to the need for storylines to be physically plausible, relevant for the specific context, and risk-informative. Apart from an illustrative gallery of storyline examples found in literature, three examples of varying scope and complexity are presented in detail, all involving the potential impact on European socio-economic sectors induced by remote climate change features occurring far outside the geographical domain of the European mainland. The storyline examples illustrate the application of the proposed storyline components and evaluate the suitability of the criteria defined in this paper. It thereby contributes to a rigorous design and application of event-based climate storyline approaches.

Climate-related disasters are increasing in many parts of the world, yet investment in disaster risk reduction (DRR) remains insufficient to manage these risks. This is despite growing recognition that DRR interventions can reduce potential impacts from disasters as well as deliver broader economic, ecological, and social co-benefits. Focusing on the net benefits of DRR, beyond avoiding losses and damages, is considered as an important strategy to strengthen the case for DRR as part of a sustainable development by academics and international organizations alike. However, there is very limited evidence of on-the-ground accounting of these “multiple resilience dividends” by those who act to reduce disaster risk at the local level. Using an innovative analytical approach, we investigate the knowledge gaps and challenges associated with considering multiple resilience dividends in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of DRR interventions at the community level for the example of flood risk. We use a newly developed framework to analyze empirical survey data on community-level DRR interventions as well as five in-depth case studies from Vietnam, Nepal, Indonesia, Afghanistan, and the United Kingdom. The analysis reveals a disconnect between available planning tools and the evidence of materialized multiple resilience dividends, which is a key obstacle to successfully apply the concept at the community level. Structured consideration of multiple resilience dividends from the planning to the monitoring and evaluation stages is required to secure local buy-in and to ensure that these dividends materialize as intended.

Climate-related risks are a major threat to humanity, affecting the lives and livelihoods of communities globally. Even with adaptation, climate change is projected to increase the severity of risks, leading to impacts and residual risks, also termed losses and damages. Frameworks and approaches using Climate Risk Management (CRM), an integration of Disaster Risk Reduction, Climate Change Adaptation, and sustainable development, are being devised to support the comprehensive management of increasing climate-related risks. Here we discuss to what extent comprehensive CRM has been implemented in three specific cases – in Peru, India and Austria. The approach is conceptually represented and evaluated using a CRM framework. The cases deal with risks associated with glacial lake outburst floods, sea level rise, tropical cyclones, salinization, riverine floods and agricultural droughts. Ultimately, we synthesise policy and research recommendations to help understand what is feasible for CRM approaches applied in practice. We find that successful CRM implementation in practice benefits from being flexible, and participatory from beginning to end, whilst considering compounding risks, and the spectrum of (just and equitable) incremental to transformational adaptation measures necessary for attending to current and projected future increases in climate-related risks.

The global health system (GHS) is ill-equipped to deal with the increasing number of transnational challenges. The GHS needs reform to enhance global resilience to future risks to health. In this article we argue that the starting point for any reform must be conceptualizing and studying the GHS as a complex adaptive system (CAS) with a large and escalating number of interconnected global health actors that learn and adapt their behaviours in response to each other and changes in their environment. The GHS can be viewed as a multi-scalar, nested health system comprising all national health systems together with the global health architecture, in which behaviours are influenced by cross-scale interactions. However, current methods cannot adequately capture the dynamism or complexity of the GHS or quantify the effects of challenges or potential reform options. We provide an overview of a selection of systems thinking and complexity science methods available to researchers and highlight the numerous policy insights their application could yield. We also discuss the challenges for researchers of applying these methods and for policy makers of digesting and acting upon them. We encourage application of a CAS approach to GHS research and policy making to help bolster resilience to future risks that transcend national boundaries and system scales

COVID-19 has revealed how challenging it is to manage global, systemic and compounding crises. Like COVID-19, climate change impacts, and maladaptive responses to them, have potential to disrupt societies at multiple scales via networks of trade, finance, mobility and communication, and to impact hardest on the most vulnerable. However, these complex systems can also facilitate resilience if managed effectively. This review aims to distil lessons related to the transboundary management of systemic risks from the COVID-19 experience, to inform climate change policy and resilience building. Evidence from diverse fields is synthesised to illustrate the nature of systemic risks and our evolving understanding of resilience. We describe research methods that aim to capture systemic complexity to inform better management practices and increase resilience to crises. Finally, we recommend specific, practical actions for improving transboundary climate risk management and resilience building. These include mapping the direct, cross-border and cross-sectoral impacts of potential climate extremes, adopting adaptive risk management strategies that embrace heterogenous decision-making and uncertainty, and taking a broader approach to resilience which elevates human wellbeing, including societal and ecological resilience.

Complex interactions involving climatic features, socio-economic vulnerability or responses, and long impact transmissions are associated with substantial uncertainty. Physical climate storylines are proposed as approach to explore complex impact transmission pathways and possible alternative unfolding of event cascades under future climate conditions. These storylines are particularly useful for climate risk assessment for complex domains, including event cascades crossing multiple disciplinary or geographical borders. For an effective role in climate risks assessments, practical guidelines are needed to consistently develop and interpret the storyline event analyses.This paper elaborates on the suitability of physical climate storyline approaches involving climate event induced shocks propagating into societal impacts. It proposes a set of common elements to construct the event storylines. In addition, criteria for their application for climate risk assessment are given, referring to the need for storylines to be physically plausible, relevant for the specific context, and risk-informative.Six examples of varying scope and complexity are presented, all involving the potential climate change impact on European socio-economic sectors induced by remote climate change features occurring far outside the geographical domain of the European mainland. The storyline examples illustrate the application of the proposed storyline components and evaluates the suitability criteria defined in this paper. It thereby contributes to the standardization of the design and application of event-based climate storyline approaches.

The global health system (GHS) is ill-equipped to deal with the increasing number of transnational challenges. The GHS needs reform to enhance global resilience to future risks to health. In this article we argue that the starting point for any reform must be conceptualizing and studying the GHS as a complex adaptive system (CAS) with a large and escalating number of interconnected global health actors that learn and adapt their behaviours in response to each other and changes in their environment. The GHS can be viewed as a multi-scalar, nested health system comprising all national health systems together with the global health architecture, in which behaviours are influenced by cross-scale interactions. However, current methods cannot adequately capture the dynamism or complexity of the GHS or quantify the effects of challenges or potential reform options. We provide an overview of a selection of systems thinking and complexity science methods available to researchers and highlight the numerous policy insights their application could yield. We also discuss the challenges for researchers of applying these methods and for policy makers of digesting and acting upon them. We encourage application of a CAS approach to GHS research and policy making to help bolster resilience to future risks that transcend national boundaries and system scales.

Climate change is widely recognized as a major risk to societies and natural ecosystems but the high end of the risk, i.e., where risks become existential, is poorly framed, defined, and analyzed in the scientific literature. This gap is at odds with the fundamental relevance of existential risks for humanity, and it also limits the ability of scientific communities to engage with emerging debates and narratives about the existential dimension of climate change that have recently gained considerable traction. This paper intends to address this gap by scoping and defining existential risks related to climate change. We first review the context of existential risks and climate change, drawing on research in fields on global catastrophic risks, and on key risks and the so-called Reasons for Concern in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We also consider how existential risks are framed in the civil society climate movement as well as what can be learned in this respect from the COVID-19 crisis. To better frame existential risks in the context of climate change, we propose to define them as those risks that threaten the existence of a subject, where this subject can be an individual person, a community, or nation state or humanity. The threat to their existence is defined by two levels of severity: conditions that threaten (1) survival and (2) basic human needs. A third level, well-being, is commonly not part of the space of existential risks. Our definition covers a range of different scales, which leads us into further defining six analytical dimensions: physical and social processes involved, systems affected, magnitude, spatial scale, timing, and probability of occurrence. In conclusion, we suggest that a clearer and more precise definition and framing of existential risks of climate change such as we offer here facilitates scientific analysis as well societal and political discourse and action.

Global failures to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis are causing massive losses and costly damages to the lives, livelihoods, and futures of communities around the world. Efforts to address the issue have been highly insufficient, and national and international humanitarian response systems are already overstretched and underfunded. There is a moral imperative to act in solidarity with those who are suffering now, and to develop an approach that will protect generations to come. This policy brief from the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliances explains how we got to this point, and makes urgent recommendations outlining how the international community can to scale up action, and resource a comprehensive approach to averting, minimizing, and addressing losses and damages.

This contributing paper reviews the governance of systemic risk with the aim to identify opportunities and enabling factors for improving governance by managing what are increasingly interdependent risks with the potential for cascading impacts. The researchers use insights from the joint International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis-International Science Council (IIASA-ISC) “Building pathways to sustainability in a post-COVID world” initiative and forensic reviews of disasters, the Post-Event Review Capability (PERC), to illustrate how sub-national and national systems have governed systemic risks. More specifically, we explore risk governance successes and failures with the goal of developing insights on how to bolster systemic risk governance in policy and practice. The study indicates that the governance of systemic risks tends is still siloed in spite of the clear need for cross-sectoral and multi-level initiatives. The examples provided from the PERCs and the IIASA-ISC initiative illustrate how single-focus risk governance limits opportunities for building resilience and effectively addressing the systemic nature of risks. They also highlight clear opportunities for shifting towards more systemic risk governance, one where risk is co-managed across institutional boundaries and risk reduction methods are founded on effective and inclusive communication.

Systemic risk is associated with cascading impacts that spread within and across systems and sectors (e.g. ecosystems, health, infrastructure and the food sector) via the movements of people, goods, capital and information within and across boundaries (e.g. regions, countries and continents). The spread of these impacts can lead to potentially existential consequences and system collapse across a range of time horizons. Globalization contributes to systemic risk affecting people worldwide. The impacts of climate change or COVID-19 show how the challenges of addressing systemic risk go beyond conventional risk management and governance. Critical system interdependencies, amplified by underlying vulnerabilities, highlight that there is a growing need to better understand cascading impacts, systemic risks and the possible political (governance) and societal responses. This includes improving our understanding of the root causes of systemic risk, both biophysical and socio-economic, and related information needs. Addressing contemporary challenges in terms of systemic risk requires integrating different systems perspectives and fostering system thinking, while implementing key intergovernmental agendas, such as the Paris Agreement, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals. This Briefing Note represents an integrated perspective of climate, environmental and disaster risk science and practice regarding systemic risk. It provides an overview of the concepts of systemic risk that have evolved over time and identifies commonalities across terminologies and perspectives associated with systemic risk used in different contexts. Key attributes of systemic risk are outlined without prescribing a single definition, and information and data requirements that are essential for a better and more actionable understanding of the systemic nature of risk are discussed. Finally, the opportunities to connect research and policy for addressing

The costs of disasters have been rising in many parts of the world due to an increase in exposed and vulnerable assets as well as the effects of climate change, including changing weather patterns and sea level rise. Investments in disaster risk reduction (DRR) remain insufficient to manage these growing risks. To make DRR investments more attractive, and to shift investments from post-event response and recovery to pre-event resilience, there has been a push to account for the full range of benefits of those investments, including economic, ecological and social ‘resilience dividends’. However, the concept of ‘multiple resilience dividends’ is not yet widely applied in practice. This paper analyses the knowledge gaps and challenges that arise from applying ‘multiple resilience dividends’ in the planning, implementation and evaluation of disaster risk reduction interventions at the community level. The authors’ analysis of community-level DRR interventions and five in-depth community case studies, from Vietnam, Nepal, Indonesia, Afghanistan and the UK, reveals a disconnect between the available planning tools and the evidence on materialised multiple resilience dividends. This disconnect poses a key obstacle in successfully applying the concept at the community level. The authors conclude that a structured consideration of multiple dividends of resilience, from the planning to the monitoring stage, is important to secure local buy-in and to ensure that the full range of benefits can materialise.

The 6-step climate risk assessment (CRA) methodology developed by the Global Programme on Risk Assessment and Management for Adaptation to Climate Change (Loss & Damage) (GP L&D) provides practitioners and decision-makers with a guidance on how to assess climate risks and how to translate the assessment into measures. CRA aims to identify risk, assess the magnitude of impacts on people, assets and ecosystems, and ascertain the possible options for action. Main characteristics of the methodology include the participation of all stakeholders, the assessment of hazards along the entire spectrum from slow onset processes to extreme weather events, the consideration of non-economic losses and damages as well as the focus on risk tolerance levels. It aims at identifying a smart mix of climate risk management measures, combining proven instruments from climate change adaptation and disaster risk management with innovative measures to address residual risks which cannot be averted. As such, CRA can support evidence-based and risk-informed decision making and planning in the context of climate change.

Climate change and the increasing risks it poses to lives and livelihoods require targeted and integrated climate risk management (CRM), especially in vulnerable countries. While extreme weather events (EWE) have been given due prominence in risk management, slow-onset processes (SOP) such as sea level rise or desertification have been less well considered. Such processes unfold gradually and occur at widely different spatial scales, and shifts in their intensity, duration, and frequency can be triggered or amplified by climate change. This working paper lays out definitions, key challenges, and opportunities for understanding risk and generating resilience to SOP (and related EWE). It describes a CRM framework developed for this purpose, and it sets out key areas for collaboration across research and develop­ment cooperation. CRM is comprehensive, integrative, and iterative by design. It can be used to help understand, assess, reduce, and/or address the diversity of risks posed by climate change, especially when planning or sustaining development progress.

The climate policy discourse on Loss and Damage has been considering options for averting, minimizing and addressing critical and increasingly systemic climate-related risks in vulnerable countries. Research has started to identify possible finance sources and mechanisms, but stopped short of positioning those options along a comprehensive risk management framework in line with the whole scope of Loss&Damage. BuildingTaking a risk analytical perspective, we present a comprehensive Loss and Damage finance taxonomy and framework made up of three pillars: finance for transformational risk management to reduce risks and adapt to climate change, risk finance to provide insurance and other risk transfer for residual risks in vulnerable countries as well as curative finance for potential unavoidable loss of ecosystems and livelihoods. We apply this taxonomy and sets of finance options to recently identified limit-prone sectors and regions that are projected to experience soft and hard limits as a consequence of slow-onset climate-related phenomena.

The consideration of disaster resilience as a multidimensional concept provides a viable and promising way forward for reducing risk and minimizing impacts today and in the future. What is missing is the understanding of the actual dynamics of resilience over time based on empirical evidence. This empirical understanding requires a consistent measure of resilience. To that end, a Technical Resilience Grading Standard for community flood resilience, was applied in a longitudinal study from 2016 to 2018 in 68 communities across the globe. We analyse the dynamics of disaster resilience using an advanced boosted regression tree modelling framework. The main outcome of our analysis is twofold: first, we found empirical evidence that the dynamics of resilience build on a typology of communities and that different community clusters experience different dynamics; and second, the dynamics of resilience follows transitional behaviour rather than a linear or continuous process. These are empirical insights that can provide ways forward, theoretically as well as practically, in the understanding of resilience as well as in regard to effective policy guidance to enhance disaster resilience.

The interlinkages between peace and sustainability are embedded in several international agreements and declarations and recognized by various research studies. However, the characteristics of their bidirectional relationship remain underexamined. Here we scope the complex and multifaceted relationship between peace and sustainability based on an experts workshop held at Hiroshima University in August 2019. The workshop focused on how peace, as a process or a condition, can help or hinder sustainability and vice versa. Relevant environmental, socio-political, and economic and technological considerations highlighted at the workshop were integrated into a co-designed heuristic guide for investigating the peace-sustainability nexus in the context of global change. The proposed guide aims to assist academic and policy researchers in identifying the specific pathways through which peace and sustainability interact when addressing complex challenges. The reinforcing potential of the two will ultimately depend on the governance and management of global transformations.

In the context of strong evidence on mounting climate-related risks and impacts across the globe, the need for 'transformational change' in climate risk management and adaptation responses has been brought forward as an important element to achieve the Paris ambitions. In the past decade, the concept has experienced increasing popularity in policy debates and academic discussions but has seen heterogenous applications and little practical insight. The paper aims to identify relevant perspectives on transformative approaches and transformational change in the context of climate risk management and adaptation to propose an actionable definition for practical application. Using a systematic search and review approach, we review different perspectives across policy and scientific publications, focusing on work published in the past decade and identify common features of what transformational change in the context of climate risk management and adaptation may involve. We show that different perspectives on transformational change in the context of climate risk management and adaptation persist, but certain areas of convergence are discernible. This includes understanding transformational change as part of a spectrum that begins with incremental change; involves climate risk management and adaptation measures focusing on deep-rooted, system-level change and tends to aim at enabling more just and sustainable futures; often oriented towards the long-term, in anticipation of future climate-related developments. In addition, we identify an 'operationalisation gap' in terms of translating transformational change ambitions into concrete transformative measures that can be replicated in practice.

Avoiding severe impacts from anthropogenic climate change requires not only substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions but also further implementation of adaptation measures. In many regions with smallholder farming systems adaptation can help ensure food security despite significantly changing climatic conditions. However, the space for adaptation measures has limits. In this paper, we investigate hard and soft adaptation limits and discuss their relevance to food security in smallholder farming food systems. We argue that soft adaptation limits can be defined by sufficiency levels of justice like basic needs, capabilities, human rights or levels of well-being. Depending on social, cultural, political and economic conditions different communities realize different sufficiency levels of justice. Furthermore, as normative claims of justice, these sufficiency levels not only allow the social, cultural and political and economic conditions of social systems to be described but also define entitlements. We show that for smallholder farming systems with low social and economic standards these entitlements might mean that soft adaptation limits can define entitlements to social and economic improvements despite transformational adaptation to changing climatic conditions.

Wildfires are a normal occurrence in much of the world, with many fire adapted ecosystems and societies (Moritz et al 2014). However, a number of drivers appear to be increasing the fire risk and propensity for losses globally (Anon 2019). These drivers include global climate change which through heat and drying is increasing landscape flammability (Podur and Wotton 2010; IPCC 2019, Jones et al 2020). Exposure is being exacerbated through increasing use of fire prone landscapes for urban development, infrastructure and related activities. There is also widespread farmland abandonment, with the consequent loss of land and fire-risk management (Komac et al 2020). Importantly, there are now indications that wildfires are increasingly characterized by severe ecosystem impacts (Lewis 2020). While smaller wildfires often have a rejuvenating effect, the catastrophic fires recently seen in Australia, US and Indonesia seem to leave some ecosystems very seriously damaged (Duncombe 2020, Ward et al 2020). This also has important socio-economic implications, including health, tourism and economic development. How to assess and deal with extreme wildfire risks in the future is a key question that needs to be addressed at the local, country and even global level.

COVID-19 has once again brought the role of governments, and their ability to cooperate and coordinate their actions into the spotlight. It has however also highlighted significant gaps in various areas including the science-policy interface; the ability of institutional mechanisms to deal with crises; in the preparedness of global and national science communities and government systems; and in access to reliable, verifiable data to inform decision making. The consultative meetings around this topic draw on lessons learned and experiences from the COVID-19 pandemic to identify effective policy tools and mechanisms that would also give due credence to issues of poverty alleviation, justice, inequalities, and the environment. The goal is to suggest pathways for more robust and responsive governance systems for an uncertain future. This report gives a summary over the discussions in the third consultative meeting that took place online, on September 1, 2020. Building on overall approach and the 1st and 2nd consultations, the IIASA-ISC team engaged with the experts to identify a set of policy options at global and national systems governance levels. The first consultation focused on drawing lessons from how COVID-19 has been governed at different levels of governance, the second consultation focused on identifying options and opportunities for enhancing governance in support of realizing sustainability objectives. The third consultation further narrowed in on the options and opportunities suggested and harvested policy perspectives with a view to identifying their feasibility and steps needed for successfully translating recommendations and options into to action.

Suitable and standardized indicators to track progress in disaster and climate resilience are increasingly considered a key requirement for successfully informing efforts towards effective disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation. Standardized measures of resilience which can be used across different geographical and socioeconomic contexts are however sparse. We present and analyze a standardized community resilience measurement framework for flooding. The corresponding measurement tool is modelled based on and adapted from a so-called ‘technical risk grading’ approach as used in the insurance sector. The grading approach of indicators is based on a two-step process: (i) raw data is collected, and (ii) experts grade the indicators, called sources of resilience, based on this data. We test this approach using approximately 1.25 million datapoints collected across more than 118 communities in nine countries. The quantitative analysis is complemented by content analysis to validate the results from a qualitative perspective. We find that some indicators can more easily be graded by looking at raw data alone, while others require a stronger application of expert judgement. We summarize the reasons for this through six key messages. One major finding is that resilience grades related to subjective characteristics such as ability, feel, and trust are far more dependent on expert judgment than on the actual raw data collected. Additionally, the need for expert judgement further increases if graders must extrapolate the whole community picture from limited raw data. Our findings regarding the role of data and grade specifications can inform ways forward for better, more efficient and increasingly robust standardized assessment of resilience. This should help to build global standardized and comparable, yet locally contextualized, baseline estimates of the many facets of resilience in order to track progress over time on disaster and climate resilience and inform the i