Development of a First-Generation Community Resilience Assessment Methodology

Objective - By 2028, develop and disseminate a database of county level community resilience indicators, an inventory and analysis of published frameworks and indicators, and scientifically grounded guidance necessary to quantitatively assess community resilience over time for the nation, based on validated community resilience indicators that account for meaningful aspects of physical, social, and economic systems.

What is the new technical idea?  

Currently, communities are encouraged to consider and plan for resilience. A more resilient community will have, among many other characteristics, improved functionality of buildings and infrastructure systems and a shorter recovery time of community functions following disruption. NIST released the Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems to help communities plan and implement prioritized measures for the built environment to improve their resilience to hazard events. The next step is to provide communities with the tools necessary to evaluate and measure their resilience.

This project develops a methodology for community-scale resilience assessment. The methodology is based on a foundational understanding that community functions are linked to buildings and infrastructure systems. Examples of community functions include: housing/shelter, the economy, health, education, sustenance, public safety, communication, transportation, religion/culture, and recreation/entertainment. Each function is delivered through interconnected components of social systems (e.g., banking, health care, personnel/staff, consumers) and physical systems (e.g., building clusters, transportation, communication). Both social and physical systems influence community resilience – or a community’s ability to function after a disruptive hazard event.

What is the research plan? 

To identify empirical relationships between community functions and physical systems, a theoretical framework of community-wide social and physical systems, their attributes, and their dependencies is being developed. This framework provides a foundation for the methodology, which has a social science approach to composite indicator (or metric) development. The following major research activities support the development of a method for community resilience assessment:

• Development of a theoretical framework
  • Establish linkages between building and infrastructure functions and societal functions
  • Identify empirical relationships
• Identify consensus indicators
  • Using Indicator inventory, identify most used indicators & broad categories
  • Identify priority list of indicators through a consensus process
• Test consensus indicators
  • Using the county level data contained within TraCR, analyze consensus indicators using quantitative and qualitative validation methods
• Selection of quantitative measurement approach
  • Develop draft conceptual model of community resilience indicators for physical, social, and economic systems
• Gain consensus around a priority list of resilience indicators
  • Map to theory and conceptual model using input from subject matter experts
• Develop priority indicators and corresponding methodology
  • Evaluate methods for indicator development
  • Select methodology for indicators development
• Data and measure selection
  • Refine and compile data contained within TraCR
  • Imputation of missing data
• Analyses for indicator development
  • Test and refine multivariate analytical methods to examine relationships between indicators and measures
  • Conduct sensitivity & uncertainty analysis for each method
• Visualize and present measurement using TraCR Interactive
• Validation studies

To support the methodology development, two distinct products are being developed. First, the Community Resilience Indicator Inventory to support the identification and consensus of indicators for testing and evaluation. This inventory was released in FY21. Second, the TraCR database will house the measures and data needed to produce the priority indicator values used in the community resilience assessment tool, TraCR Interactive. The TraCR database will be developed in phases. At the completion of each phase, an updated version will include new components for selected geographies, with options for indicator weighting, visualizing results, and downloading data to come in future phases. The first version of the TraCR database is expected to be released to the public in FY25 with beta version testing occurring in FY24.

The community resilience assessment tool, TraCR Interactive, and associated guidance documents will be science-based, user-friendly, and applicable to communities of varying sizes without requiring extensive technical support to implement. TraCR Interactive will be a web-based tool for assessing resilience indicator scores over time for a particular community. TraCR Interactive will be a web-based version of the TraCRdatabase, with enhanced functionality. The enhancements will include the following: the original database of indicators; a set of priority indicators; each priority indicator computed over time for at least one spatial scale; public data sources for all indicators and measures; and data visualization tools for the resilience scores. TraCR Interactive will also have weighted priority indicators in a summary dashboard that can be assessed over multiple time periods. Additionally, guidance will be available to support the development of resilience indicator scores for communities wishing to use geographic scales and/or indicator measures that differ from those used by NIST. For example, a community may wish to examine their resilience at a finer scale than the county-level, the community may have better quality data about aspects of their population, or, they may wish to  integrate climate change projections into their resilience planning efforts.