# 84 Can Resilience be Measured?

How Do We Measure Resilience?

Resilience is a concept that is intuitively understood but surprisingly difficult to measure. For the Earth as a system, the Planetary Boundaries Framework offers a relatively precise set of measures that help define resilience in environmental terms—essentially, how much pressure our planet can absorb before its vital systems are at risk. But when it comes to individuals, organizations, or even entire societies, no such commonly accepted measurement framework exists.

This gap has been on my mind lately. What does it mean to be resilient as a person, as a community, or as a country? Is resilience simply about surviving—living a long life? But what if that life is filled with suffering or stagnation? Should we instead be talking about living a long and happy life? But then—what is happiness? And how do we measure it?

Recently, two global reports offered fresh insights into how we quantify aspects of life quality and development: the Human Development Report and the World Happiness Report. Both attempt to answer big questions about the quality of life on Earth, and they’ve inspired me to explore how their approaches might help us think about resilience—especially how to measure it in a more holistic, meaningful way.

Human Development Index

The Human Development Index (HDI) shifts the focus of national progress away from simple economic growth and toward broader human well-being. It’s built around three key dimensions: life expectancy, education, and income.

But there’s also a more nuanced version: the Planetary Pressures–Adjusted HDI (PHDI). It takes the core HDI and adjusts it based on each country’s carbon dioxide emissions per capita (production based) and material footprint per capita (consumption based). In other words, it adds environmental sustainability to the equation—rewarding countries that achieve high development outcomes while placing less stress on the planet. Below you can find top 10 losers and gainer from OECD countries.

This change significantly reshuffles the rankings. For instance, only Sweden and Denmark remained in the top 10, while countries like Poland made substantial gains—moving from 35th to 10th when environmental impact was considered.

I find this shift extremely important—and deeply connected to resilience. Countries that manage to achieve strong development outcomes with relatively low environmental pressure show a kind of creative resourcefulness. This reminds me of the concept of bricolage—the ability to achieve goals using the resources at hand. It’s a type of flexibility, a capacity to move forward with a lighter backpack, free of unnecessary kilograms. That makes such societies more agile, more adaptable—and ultimately, more resilient.

If we accept that high carbon emissions and large material footprints are symptoms of over-dependence on investments, then reducing them can be seen as a step toward greater self-reliance and system robustness. Lower environmental impact isn’t just a moral or ecological win—it’s also a sign of smarter, more resilient development.

Happiness Index

While the HDI and PHDI focus on tangible outcomes, the World Happiness Report takes a different route. It looks at subjective well-being. The core Happiness Index is based on the three years average of The Gallup World Poll, which asks respondents to evaluate their current life as a whole using the image of a ladder, with the best possible life for them as a 10 and the worst possible as a 0.

The index ist just one question but the authors investigate specific aspects of life and their impact on happiness. Based on the extensive analysis and results of OLS Regression they identified six variables with the largest impact on happiness:

• GDP per capita

• Healthy life expectancy

• Social support (someone to count on)

• Freedom to make life choices

• Generosity (frequency of donations)

• Perceptions of corruption in government and business [1].

Only one of these factors — generosity — is primarily driven by individual behavior. The rest are strongly influenced by the societal context: political institutions, healthcare systems, education access, public trust. Your own attitude, mental strength can have certain impact but it is not measured in the Happiness Index. This suggests that happiness, too, is not merely an individual trait—it’s shaped, perhaps even produced, by the systems around us.

GDP and life expectancy appear in both the HDI and Happiness Index, reinforcing their importance. Interestingly, education is not included in the Happiness Index, though it is used as a control variable [2]. This doesn't necessarily mean it's unimportant—it simply doesn’t show a direct, linear impact in this specific statistical model. While the regression coefficient for GDP per capita is lower compared to other factors like social support, this does not mean GDP has low predictive power. In fact, in most country-level decompositions, it remains a major driver of differences in happiness scores [3].

But what I find most thought-provoking is this: the happiness factors are deeply social. They reflect collective resilience. Strong societies put mechanisms in place that allow individuals to thrive—even in the face of shocks or uncertainty. We find this also in the world of organisations, which through certain mechanisms can build resilience of its entire workforce.

What Does This Tell Us About Resilience?

Do these two reports—HDI and the Happiness Index—tell us something about societal resilience? I think they do, but not the full story.

A resilient individual isn’t necessarily someone who’s lived a long and happy life. That could simply mean they were fortunate enough to avoid major disruptions. Resilience, in much of the literature, is defined as the capacity to absorb and adapt to change or stress. It’s not tested until something goes wrong.

But on a societal level, the picture becomes more complex. If the average citizen in a country is both healthy and happy, this points to high regulatory capacity—a society that manages its systems well. That, in itself, is a kind of resilience. It suggests not just luck, but the presence of deep, stable mechanisms for supporting human flourishing.

Both these indexes adopt a societal perspective. They view individuals not as isolated units, but as people embedded within networks—families, communities, governments. Resilience, then, becomes a collective quality, built through collaboration, trust, and shared systems.

So How Should We Measure Resilience?

I’m not proposing a new resilience index—at least not today. But I do believe these two reports provide valuable pieces of the puzzle. They hint at what matters: health, economical strength, social trust, resource efficiency, freedom, and institutional strength. These are not just development goals or happiness factors—they’re the building blocks of resilient societies.

So I’ll leave you with a few questions:

• Which of the variables from the HDI and the Happiness Index are most essential to resilience?

• What’s missing from both reports when we think about adaptability, creativity, or stress response?

• Should we try to measure societal resilience more directly—and if so, how?

I believe this is a conversation worth having. If you’re thinking about how individuals and organizations can adapt and thrive in a changing world, I invite you to join the conversation.

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Resources and Notes

Human Development Report

World Hapiness Report

[1] These six variables explain more than three-quarters of the variation in life evaluations across countries and years, using data from 2005 through 2024. Even though individual correlations are not presented, the parameters of the model indicate a very strong predictive power.

[2] - Education is one of the control variables: they are included in the analysis to account for its potential influence on the outcome.

[3] - On page 23 of the World Happiness Report regression coefficients are presented, however their values can not be compared to each other as variables were not standardised. On pages 17-19 Happiness Index is split by those six factors and their contribution is country specific.