Products

NIST Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems

The NIST Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems (Guide) provides a practical and flexible approach to help all communities improve their resilience by setting priorities and allocating resources to manage risks for their prevailing hazards. Volume I of the Guide describes the six-step planning process and provides a worked example to illustrate the process. Volume II is a resource that describes how to characterize the social and economic dimensions of the community, dependencies and cascading consequences, and building and infrastructure performance. Using the Guide can help communities to integrate consistent resilience goals into their comprehensive, economic development, zoning, mitigation, and other local planning activities that impact buildings, public utilities, and other infrastructure systems.

The Guide Briefs (GB) provide methods and best practices to complement the Guide, with additional rationale, guidance, and references for implementing the six steps in the planning process.  The Briefs are numbered in the order that they are released.

General Guidance

GB 7 - Guide Use By All Community Types

Español: Uso de la Guía para todos los tipos de comunidades    

GB 15 - Additional Applications of the Community Resilience Planning Guide

Step 1: Form a Collaborative Planning Team

GB 14 - Forming a Collaborative Planning Team and Engaging the Community

Step 2: Understand the Situation

GB 1 - Characterize the Population

Español: Informe de Referencia 1: Caracterización de la Población                       

GB 2 - Identify Social Institutions

Español: Identificación de las instituciones sociales                          

GB 5 - Assessing Energy System Dependencies

Español: Evaluación de las dependencias del sistema energético

GB 6 - How Communities Can Work with Communication Service Providers to Understand Communication Systems

Español: De qué manera las comunidades pueden trabajar junto con los proveedores de servicios de comunicaciones para entender los sistemas de comunicación

GB 10 - Linking Social Dimensions and Building Clusters

Español: Vinculación de las dimensiones sociales y los grupos de edificios

• Performance Goals Table Template

Step 3: Determine Goals and Objectives

GB 4 - Determining Anticipated Performance

Español: Determinar el desempeño previsto

GB 4A - Example for Determining Anticipated Performance

Español: Ejemplo para determinar el desempeño previsto

GB 9 - Summarizing Resilience Goals using Performance Goals Tables

Español: Resumen de los objetivos de resiliencia mediante tablas de objetivos de desempeño

• Performance Goals Table Template

GB 11 - Determining Building Cluster Performance Goals

Español: Determinación de los objetivos de desempeño de los grupos de edificios

Step 4: Plan Development

GB 3 - Existing Community Resilience Activities Identifying Solutions to Address Resilience Gaps

Español: Actividades existentes de resiliencia comunitaria Identificación de soluciones para abordar brechas de resiliencia

GB 8 - Overcoming Myths about Community Resilience Planning

Español: Derribar mitos sobre la planificación de resiliencia comunitaria

GB 13 - Resilience Gaps – Identifying and Prioritizing Closure of Resilience Gaps

Español: Brechas de resiliencia – Identificación y priorización del cierre de las brechas de resiliencia

Step 5: Plan Preparation, Review, and Approval

Step 6: Plan Implementation and Maintenance

GB 12 - Short-Term Implementation Tasks

Español: Tareas de implementación a corto plazos

Planning Guide Playbook

The companion Playbook is designed to be a practical, action-focused aid that helps communities follow the Guide’s six-step process. It can support communities looking for insights into resilience planning issues and help identify the most effective resilience-improvement projects. It can be used independently or with expert support and also provides ways to involve experts in the planning and implementation processes. The Playbook helps ensure all communities can benefit from the Guide’s planning approach.

Step 1: Form a Collaborative Planning Team

Templates

• Template 1-1: Forming a Collaborative Planning Team
  • Supports Action 1-1 (Playbook pg.9) and Action 1-2 (Playbook pg.10)
• Template 1-2: Stakeholder Engagement Planning
  • Supports Actions 1-2 (Playbook pg.10), Action 1-4 (Playbook pg.12); and also Action 5-2 (Playbook pg.46)

Step 2: Understand the Situation

Templates

• Template 2-1: Information Needed to Complete Step 2, Action 2-4
  • Supports Action 2-4 (Playbook pg.19) and related information for Action 3-2 (Playbook pg.26), Action 3-4 (Playbook pg.32)
• Template 2-2: Identifying Building Cluster Template
  • Supports Action 2-4 (Playbook pg.19)
• Template 2-3: Identifying Infrastructure System Template
  • Supports Action 2-4 (Playbook pg.19)

External Resources

• Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard Guidebook (PIRS) Table 2.1 - Supports Action 2-1
  • About PIRS
  • Detailed PIRS Document

Step 3: Determine Goals and Objectives

Templates

• Template 3-1: Buildings Performance Goals Table
  • Supports Action 3-2 (Playbook pg.26), Action 3-4 (Playbook pg.32)
• Template 3-2: Infrastructure System Performance Goal Tables
  • Supports Action 3-2 (Playbook pg.26), Action 3-4 (Playbook pg.32)
• Template 3-3: Identifying Community Hazards and Levels
  • Supports Action 3-3 (Playbook p.31)
• Template 3-4: Summary Performance Goals Table
  • Supports Action 3-5 (Playbook pg.35)

External Resources

• Boulder County Collaborative Resilience Design Performance Standard for Infrastructure and Dependent Facilities (2016) - Supports Action 3-2 (Playbook pg.26), Action 3-4 (Playbook pg.32)
  • Boulder County Collaborative Resilience Design Performance Standard for Infrastructure and Dependent Facilities. (Tables 1-8, pp. 11-18)
• Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment (THIRA) and Stakeholder Preparedness Review (SPR) Guide, Comprehensive Preparedness Guide (CPG) 201 (2018) - Supports Action 3-3 (Playbook p.31)
  • THIRA process Step 1: Identify the Threats and Hazards of Concern & Step 2: Give Threats and Hazards Context (pp. 11-18)

Step 4 - 6: No Templates 

Indicator 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.

• 3298 indicators and 7165 measures

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.

TraCR

The Tracking Community Resilience (TraCR) database is a tool for developing and testing analytical methods for computing county-level indicators for community resilience. The database will be provided as a public tool for tracking indicators over time for a variety of state and local needs. The public version of the TraCR database will be released through the NIST Public Data Repository in FY 2025 and will consist of a data file and supporting documentation. The team plans to release versions that expand the number of indicators and years for which the data are available.  To date, TraCR contains data for all 3230 counties (or county equivalents) in the contiguous US, as well as Hawaii, Alaska,  Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

Alternatives for Resilient Communities (ARC)

(ARC) is an interactive tool for developing alternative sets of actions that meet community resilience and cost goals, given hazard and interdependency information and socio-economic data.

NIST ARC is designed to assist a collaborative planning team in the identification of solutions as outlined in NIST’s Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems.  The target user of NIST ARC is an analyst working in close collaboration with the planning team.  The analyst would facilitate the team’s interactive use of NIST ARC, including refinement of targets and imposition of new constraints to address stakeholder comments or concerns, and to explore tradeoffs.

Supporting Codes (ARC)

A range of supporting codes for scenario generation, uncertainty modeling, and AI surrogate modeling.

Supporting Codes

Economic Decision Guide (EDG)

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.  

EDGe$ (Economic Decision Guide Software) Online Tool

EDGe$ is a powerful, platform-independent online technique for selecting cost-effective, infrastructure-based community resilience projects based on the process found in the EDG.

It helps the user to identify and compare the relevant present and future resilience costs and benefits associated with new capital investment versus maintaining a community’s status-quo. Benefits include cost savings and damage loss avoidance because enhancing resilience on a community scale creates value, including co-benefits, even if a hazard event does not strike.

• Online Tutorial
  • Economic Decision Guide Software (EDGe$) Online Tutorial: Wildfire Urban Interface (WUI) Case Study
  • Economic Decision Guide Software (EDGe$) Online Tutorial: University Pandemic Planning Analysis Use Case
• EDGe$ Use Success Stories
  • Jackson County Utility Authority, Mississippi
  • Biloxi Bay, Mississippi

Indicator Science Guidance

This technical subseries documents the resilience indicator development methodologies used by the NIST Community Resilience Program and highlights the best practices for the development, selection, testing, and validation of resilience indicators.

NIST SP 2300: Resilience Indicator Development and Best Practices