It is important for one to be able to compare the resilience of complex human systems to different types of disasters, in order to assess their inherent vulnerabilities and take appropriate actions to strengthen them. Resilient behavior can be complicated and multi-dimensional, however, and one must be able to characterize the different ways in which that resilience actually exhibits itself in practice. With this in mind, we present a multi-dimensional indicator for quantifying the resilience of a complex human system, and we discuss an approach for characterizing the relationships between each of the individual resilience dimensions. Because different dimensions may contribute to the overall resilience to varying degrees, we also discuss the effect that differentially weighting the relevant dimensions can have on the relative ranking of different scenarios. The application of the approach is illustrated through an empirical data set that measures the relative resilience of the New York metropolitan area to a number of different natural disasters between 2010 and 2012.
