Resilient Communities for Future Hazards and Changing Conditions

Objective
Publish (by 2026) a guidance document on flood mitigation alternatives for Community Resilience Planning specific to the built environment that effectively incorporates future hazards. Publish (by 2028) guidance documents for characterizing future hazards and conditions to support structural reliability and resilience planning for the built environment and communities. 

Technical Idea
Performance of the Built Environment is governed by the adoption and enforcement of codes and standards. ASCE 7, Minimum Design Loads and Associated Criteria for Buildings and Other Structures, is the primary standard for design loads and load effects. The next edition, ASCE 7-28, will address future hazards and conditions, providing a national consensus standard for designers and communities. NIST is supporting this first effort with science and engineering analyses for nonstationary reliability methods and characterization of future loads for a range of hazards, such as wind, flood, and atmospheric ice. This effort will help identify critical measurement science gaps that need to be addressed.

Community resilience planning for social and built systems can be used to reduce disaster losses and risks from future hazards and changing conditions. This holistic approach reflects a diverse set of planning practices that are implemented by a variety of local officials with a range of training and technical backgrounds, including urban planners, architects and engineers, infrastructure managers, sustainability officials, and emergency managers.

Statistical machine learning techniques will be used to systematically analyze documents, public comments, and social media to develop new methods to measure community perceptions of resilience for future hazards and conditions. By leveraging advanced Natural Language Processing techniques, the project seeks to identify patterns in public comments that indicate key conceptions, causal beliefs, preferences, and perceived impacts. This approach will enhance the understanding of mitigation and adaptation tradeoffs for the built environment. 

Research Plan
Infrastructure and community resilience to future hazards and conditions is needed. To support this goal, NIST is well positioned to: (1) develop actionable measurement science research at the community level in collaboration with end users and (2) transfer actionable science to guidance documents and standards. The project will develop a science-based approach to address nonstationary future hazards and conditions for buildings and infrastructure, including future hazard characterization for design applications and material and structural system performance.