I believe, resilience, as it is used in DRR literature, is more a concept that covers coping and adaptation capacity as these relate to vulnerability. In this meaning, improving resilience of a community covers broader class of measures with some dynamic features that anticipate future risks and risk trends. At the same time it should be more effective than being the mere opposite of vulnerability that has a more static nature.
In my view, vulnerability is opposite to coping and resistence, while resilience is related to the capacity of the system to quickly recover damages. So a system could be highly vulnerable (because of high environmental or socio-econimic value) but also have high resilience, i.e. it could come back rapidly to the equilibrium. It is clear to me that at a certain point/scales the two concepts are related (vulnerability and resilience) as high resilience could decrease vulnerability (but I don't think is the proper opposite, the two are just correlated).
I agree with Mr. Antonio but at the same time would like to add for the last part of the question on to how to do assessment in quantitative way. Well for this I could suggest that you can prepare a questionnaire covering the various aspects of vulnerability and adaptation and you could use a ranking mechanism based on people’s perception. Thereafter one could go for preparation of various vulnerability index or adaptation index and give a quantitative shape to your research. However higher forms would also include numerical prediction, time series analysis and so on.
Some resources in this aspect could be:
1. http://www.springerlink.com/content/l28822656153g225/
2. http://www.springerlink.com/content/e5371n2121732151/
Nicholas Nassim Taleb proposes a trichotomy of systems, in his book Antifragile, in which resilience is one of three categories: fragile (vulnerable), resilient (robust), antifragile. So for him, the opposite of vulnerable is antifragile (a word coined by him). He believes that resilience is more like coping with the status quo. Whereas systems that are antifragile gain from uncertainty and riskiness. The entire book is an exposition on this and is a fun read just to see where things fit in the scheme of resilience and vulnerability; risks and uncertainty. More formal approaches are documented in the notes at the back of the book.Personally I believe resilience can be antifragile in the sense of transformation or inter-scale crossovers-investigated by C.S.Hollings and the like.
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