Community Resilience Assessment Methodology Products

Inventory of Community Resilience Indicators & Assessment Frameworks

There are two foundational products being developed by the Community Resilience Assessment Methodology team to ultimately arrive at a first-generation methodology to assess resilience at the community-scale based on community functions, supported by buildings and infrastructure systems, and the recovery of those functions following a disruptive hazard event.

The first product is the Inventory of Community Resilience Indicators & Assessment Frameworks (Inventory). The Inventory takes the form of a database which contains 56 existing quantitative resilience frameworks, indicators, and measures that have been evaluated and catalogued according to a standardized methodology. The indicators span all systems likely to be included in an assessment methodology, including physical systems (i.e., buildings and infrastructure), social and economic systems, and natural systems (i.e., natural environment). One aspect of this work is to identify the types of indicators that should be used as proxies to represent system attributes, dimensions, and dependencies. The Inventory can be used in conjunction with the Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems.

The Inventory is accompanied by two items:

• An annotated bibliography that outlines each framework in terms of goals and scope of the framework or assessment method, how the framework or assessment method was developed, and who created the tool.
• A data article which describes the data associated with each framework and presents summary descriptive statistics for the Inventory.

Tracking Community Resilience Database

The second foundational component is the Tracking Community Resilience (TraCR) database. TraCR is a tool for developing and testing analytical methods for computing county-level indicators for community resilience. While TraCR is initially aimed at providing NIST researchers with a toolbox for community resilience indicator development, the database will ultimately be provided as a public tool for tracking indicators over time, including calculating and visualizing the indicators, and exploring weighting options. TraCR is not available to the public at this time.

TraCR is expected to support the final assessment methodology, which will include selected priority indicators, the analytical approach(es) for computing each indicator over time in a relevant manner for at least one spatial scale, best practices for how the approach can be replicated for different spatial scales, public data sources for all indicators, sensitivity and uncertainty analysis, and validation studies.

TraCR database is a web-based tool that enables data to be downloaded in CSV format via its map-based user interface. There will be automated data updates as they become available from the various public sources (e.g., US Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics). To date, TraCR contains data for all 3230 counties (or county equivalents) in the US, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.