Abstract

There is a growing global demand for rigorous monitoring and evaluation of resilience and the efficacy of resilience interventions. Yet, people striving to assess resilience face significant hurdles relating to data accessibility, comprehensiveness, and quality. This paper reflects on two projects that are attempting to navigate these hurdles, as part of the ‘Resilience Trajectories’ programme of the Resilience to Nature’s Challenges National Science Challenge. The first project, the New Zealand Resilience Index development, is used to illustrate the data-related challenges and limitations of quantitative resilience assessments. We argue that composite indicators are useful aids for beginning a robust discussion about resilience assessment, but high level indicators must be supplemented with local knowledge and contextual information to facilitate meaningful decision making. The second project, the Data Integration and Visualisation En Masse (DIVE) web-based data catalogue, presents a partial solution to some of the resilience data challenges we have observed in the creation of the national index.