Abstract

Communities might be subject to extreme natural events that can negatively affect the lives and well-being of individuals. Decision makers are often concerned with creating community resilience and sustainability goals to mitigate the negative effects that extreme natural events can have on individual and community well-being. To create and evaluate these resilience and sustainability goals, decision makers rely on quantification metrics that evaluate changes in well-being. The Capability Approach (CA) provides a rational framework for selecting quantification metrics for well-being before, during, and after a natural disaster. This chapter presents community resilience and sustainability goals that can be defined in terms of acceptability and tolerability limits on capabilities and/or permissible inequalities in the distribution of capabilities across individuals. The study of a real community is used to illustrate two example quantification metrics.