The Community Resilience Economic Decision Guide and Online Tool

The Community Resilience Economic Decision Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems (EDG) provides a standard economic methodology for evaluating investment decisions aimed at improving the ability of communities to adapt to, withstand, and quickly recover from disruptive events. The EDG is designed for use in conjunction with the companion Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems.

• The EDG offers an easy-to-follow approach that describes the cost and benefits for the variety of resilience options that a community may be considering.
• The EDG seven-step process assesses and compares alternative infrastructure projects for community resilience by analyzing the benefits and costs associated with competing capital improvements to support selecting investment strategies.
• The EDG can be used as a standalone tool, but it is designed as part of a more comprehensive planning process and in combination with the Guide.  

The EDG frames the economic decision process by identifying and comparing the present and future streams of costs and benefits of resilience investments to the status-quo. Benefits are realized through cost savings and damage loss avoidance. Other topics include non-market values, uncertainty, co-benefits related to resilience investments, and positive and negative externalities—costs or benefits that impact a third party for a given strategy. 

NIST has also produced the EDGe$ Tool Version 1.0, a powerful, platform-independent online technique for selecting cost-effective, infrastructure-based community resilience projects based on the process found in the Community Resilience Economic Decision Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems.