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PROJECTS/PROGRAMS

Development and Implementation of the Community Resilience Planning Guides

Summary

Community resilience addresses the intersection of social science, engineering, economics, and other disciplines to improve the way communities prepare for, resist, respond to, and recover from disruptive hazard events. This project focuses on the role that buildings and infrastructure systems play in assuring the resilience of communities, how their performance affects community social and economic functions, and how social and economic functions can better inform the design of the built environment.

Guidance documents and related tools are developed to support the implementation of the Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems (Guide) by communities, professional organizations, and government agencies. Input from the collaborations is used to inform future documents and tools.

Description

Objective - By 2028, publish updated community resilience planning and decision-making guidance documents that are supported by multi-objective resilience planning & analysis tools, based on collaboration and engagement with end-user communities, professional organizations, and government agencies.

What is the new technical idea?

Resilience is “the ability to prepare for and adapt to changing conditions and to withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions.” Most communities prepare for disruptive hazard events through mitigation measures and emergency response for life safety but may not consider post-event damage or the cascading consequences that can disrupt communities due to interdependencies between the built environment and social/economic functions. If recovery plans are not in place, communities may experience significant disruptions after hazard events and have long recovery times with corresponding loss of businesses and population. Improved guidance and tools are needed that include consideration of recovery of community functions after damaging hazard events.

The Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems (Guide, 2016), the subsequent Playbook (2020), and ASTM standard guide (2022) provides communities with a 6-step process to develop and improve a resilience plan that prioritizes alternative measures to improve resilience, a focus on recovery of vital services in a timely manner, and potentially to ‘build better’ for the future. The Guide provides a practical, flexible methodology for setting priorities and allocating resources to reduce risks. A key concept is the consideration of social and economic functions when establishing performance goals for recovery of buildings and infrastructure systems. The Guide can also be an effective tool to integrate existing community plans and prioritize resources to meet resilience objectives.

Since the publication of the Guide and Playbook, advances in community-scale resilience and hazard risk modeling have increased the availability of decision support tools for characterizing current and future local scale hazard exposure. These tools, such as IN-CORE (2023), have increased the ability of communities to employ the Guide methodology by quantifying resilience assessments and mitigation alternatives. Updates to the Guide will reflect advances in resilience modeling, methods for using recovery metrics and indicators, and approaches for incorporating future hazard conditions. Additionally, collaborative efforts with communities, professional organizations, and government agencies implementing the guidance documents and tools will be used to inform updates.

What is the research plan?

Community Resilience Guidance

The NIST Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems (published in 2016) and user-friendly Playbook (published in 2020) provides a practical and flexible 6-step approach to help communities improve their resilience by setting priorities and allocating resources to manage risks for their prevailing hazards. Since the publication of the Guide and Playbook, NIST has worked with communities, educators, professional associations, and standard development organizations to employ the Guide methodology to develop community-scale resilience plans and mainstream/integrate community resilience into other community plans (e.g., hazard mitigation plans, general plans).

Stakeholder outreach in 2022 identified further guidance needs relating to addressing the risks posed by future natural hazard conditions. In 2023 and 2024, through partnerships with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), NIST hosted a workshop series that addressed leading practices by communities to incorporate future climate and hazard conditions in their resilience plans. The proceedings of these workshops are informing updates to NIST’s Community Resilience Planning Guide. Beginning in 2025, NIST is developing an addendum to the Guide that will provide guidance to communities on future natural hazard conditions, specifically sea level rise, flooding, and wildland fire. The addendum will also identify available decision support tools and authoritative data sources. Following the publication of the addendum, building on recommendations from NIST’s partnerships, NIST will begin developing an update to the Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems. This update will incorporate advances in community resilience measurement science, advances in community resilience modeling and hazards modeling, and economic decision support tools developed by NIST and partner organizations.

Standards Development

In 2022, an ASTM Standard Guide for Community Resilience Planning for Buildings and Infrastructure was published by the ASTM E54 Homeland Security Standards Committee and the ASTM E60 Sustainability Committee (https://www.astm.org/e3350-22.html). The development of this standard guide was informed by findings in NIST SP 1240: Data, Information, and Tools Needed for Community Resilience Planning and Decision-Making (https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.1240), where resilience researchers, practitioners, and community leaders identified the need for a standard approach for community resilience planning. NIST led a committee of subject-matter experts to develop the standard. The committee membership represented the fields of architecture and engineering design, emergency management, building codes and associated standard development organizations, municipal government, and sustainability. NIST also provided substantive input to the ASTM E3341 Standard Guide for General Principles of Resilience by the E60 Sustainability Committee.

Stakeholder Engagement

Since the publication of the Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems, NIST has worked with communities, professional organizations, and government agencies using the NIST guidance documents to identify other needs for guidance and tools, and to develop success stories as guidance to other communities. Community input on using the guidance documents also informs future documents and tools.

NIST has collaborated with federal agencies that have common resilience interests (e.g., HUD, FEMA, EDA, NOAA). NIST also worked with University of Maryland’s Center for Global Sustainability researchers to conduct resilience planning activities based on the Guide with Anne Arundel County, Charles County, and Queen Anne’s County, Maryland. More recently, NIST partnered with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to use the Guide to support resilience planning by Southampton Township, NJ and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.

NIST also collaborated with the the Center for Risk-based Community Resilience Planning on developing quantitative, science-based methods to build community models, simulate hazard scenarios, compute estimated infrastructure damage, population dislocation, and economic impacts, and assess the effectiveness of mitigation alternatives. NIST and the Center for Risk-based Community Resilience Planning partnered with communities to develop resilience plans through a series of workshops that included the community and recovery modeling capabilities of IN-CORE. The IN-CORE modeling framework and user-interface is based on the Guide and Playbook planning method and provides a scientific basis for simulating hazard scenarios and associated consequences at the community scale.