Impact assessment of communication on climate risks is quite a new practice. The emergent recognition of the importance of communication can also be observed in the literature on climate resilience indicators. This study analyses and compares different resilience assessment frameworks that consider communication processes and infrastructure, a feature that has recently gained importance among the available indicators for cities coping with climate risks. Following this review, we conceived a new approach to comprehend the impact of communication on urban resilience to extreme weather. We designed and tested novel "Resilience Communication Indicators" (RCIs), with the aim of detecting possible correlations between communication processes and environmental processes. At the same time, we adopted a dynamic perspective that goes beyond a description of the state of communication processes and infrastructure in an urban area exposed to climate risks. Indeed, the RCIs are tailored to appraise how specific communication activities contribute to achieving local resilience goals. These indicators require a rich and detailed selection of communication variables that are activity driven; i.e. of resilience changes that occur even in a brief time, and the causes related to a past or ongoing communication activity. The results of this study are presented in R. Vicari, I. Tchiguirinskaia, D. Schertzer, Assessing public outreach strategies in cities coping with climate risks, Geoscience Communication Discussion, doi.org/10.5194/gc-2018-4 This research was supported by the Chair Hydrology for Resilient Cities (endowed by Veolia) and the Interreg NWE IVB RainGain project.