A framework for cities and environmental resilience assessment of local governments.

This paper examines the concepts of the resilient cities and environmental resilience and employ a framework of assessing resilient city and develop and trial indicators to assess the environmental resilience of local governments. As a result, the resilient city has been defined as one having the ability to respond to multiple risks. The author employs a structure consisting of the types of resilient measures (precautionary, adaptive, and conversion measures) being prepared by local governments (administrative indicators) and the types of external forces and vulnerabilities that local governments face and anticipated situations to be avoid (end points) for which such measures are being prepared, as well as quantitative (urban indicators) and qualitative (citizen indicators) assessment of the types of potential capabilities they possess. The author developed more than 130 indicators in total. Results of using a questionnaire to local governments across Japan in order to measure administrative indicators showed that threats anticipated by most local governments included earthquakes, population decreases, and increases in greenhouse-gas emissions, and the resilience measures they are implementing and preparing included promotion of renewable energy as a preventive measure and enhancement of methods of collecting and providing disaster-related information as an adaptive measure. • The resilient city has been defined as one having the ability to respond to multiple risks in Japan. • A precautionary, adaptive, and conversion resilient measures examined with local governments • The author applied more than 130 resilient indicators across Japan. • Results showed that earthquakes, population decreases, and increases in greenhouse-gas emissions are top threats in [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]