RescueME Resilience Baseline Assessment Survey
Why a Baseline Assessment?
A baseline assessment is needed to establish a clear understanding of the initial resilience conditions in a cultural landscape before starting to identify measures and implement solutions. The resilience baseline assessment aims to represent the current status of a cultural landscape based on the views, experiences, and knowledge of the stakeholders involved. It helps to identify potential strengths and weaknesses as well as challenges and capacities across different system dimensions and in the different local settings.
With that, it sets the groundwork for further activities by providing information to other tasks relevant in the Resilience Building Circle. These are for example the local risk assessment, the application of the serious game, and the co-creation of local resilience measures and solutions. The baseline assessment therefore functions as a foundational step that supports both, analysis and implementation.
In RescueME, it further allowed the R-Labs (the RescueME case studies) to complement one another and provided a shared starting point for the co-creation of solutions, measures, and resilience strategies at later stages of the project.
What is the Resilience Baseline Assessment methodology?
The Resilience Baseline Assessment (RBA) is a structured methodology used to evaluate the existing level of resilience in a cultural landscape prior to the implementation of resilience-building interventions. The approach focused on the RescueME Framework, that structured indicators to characterize resilience in cultural landscapes. With that, the RBA covers the aspects of the Socio-Ecological-Technical System (SETS) and their associated capitals (social, human, financial, natural, and built capital). The RBA thus measures multiple resilience dimensions within a local system.
The assessment combines qualitative data collection with analytical evaluation methods. Information is primarily gathered through questionnaires and surveys distributed to targeted stakeholders and user groups. These surveys help to capture local knowledge, awareness, perceptions, and experiences, which are essential for understanding the local context.
The collected information is analysed using a qualitative methodology and classified through a traffic-light system indicating areas of positive performance, areas requiring action, and identified weaknesses. In addition, the approach includes a preliminary resilience assessment using existing resilience tools and indicator frameworks to evaluate the maturity of resilience-building processes.
Overall, the RBA methodology serves as a diagnostic and preparatory step that informs subsequent resilience building activities, supports decision-making, and enables the identification of priority areas for intervention and co-creation.
The survey is available in English, Croatian, Italian, Spanish, German and Greek.