Development and Implementation of the Community Resilience Planning Guides

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

Technical idea 
Pre-disaster resilience planning that considers the interdependence between a community’s buildings, infrastructure systems, and the social and economic functions they support is essential for making risk- and community-informed decisions to effectively mitigate hazards and recover quickly from disasters. The Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems (Guide, 2016)1,the subsequent Playbook (2020)2, and ASTM standard guide (2022)3 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 the 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)4, 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. 
 

Research plan
The NIST Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems (published in 2016) and its user-friendly Playbook (published in 2020) provide a practical and flexible six-step approach to help communities improve their resilience by setting priorities and allocating resources to manage risks associated with their primary hazards. Since the publication of these resources, NIST has collaborated with communities, educators, professional associations, and standard development organizations to apply the Guide's methodology to develop community-scale resilience plans and incorporate community resilience into other planning documents (e.g., hazard mitigation plans, general plans). Stakeholder outreach in FY22 and FY23 identified additional guidance needs related to addressing risks from future natural hazard conditions. In FY24, through partnerships with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), NIST hosted a series of workshops focused on best practices by communities for integrating future climate and hazard conditions into resilience plans. The outcomes of these workshops are informing updates to NIST’s Community Resilience Planning Guide.

Beginning in FY25, NIST engaged stakeholders in planning and updating the Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems. Stakeholder input will inform how the Community Resilience Planning Guide updates reflect advances in community resilience measurement science; hazard, vulnerability, and resilience modeling; and economic decision support tools developed by NIST and partners. It will also reflect progress in community experience with resilience planning and new practices, such as evaluating current methods and identifying future guidance needs for including community resilience measures and indicators in plans, as well as using publicly available hazard and vulnerability assessment tools. Additionally, stakeholder engagement will explore guidance needs for communities planning for future natural hazards, along with identifying available decision support tools and authoritative data sources. The updates to the Community Resilience Planning Guide are intended for technical users who engage directly with community stakeholders well-versed in urban and hazard mitigation planning, natural hazard risk assessment, and the incorporation of resilience planning results into community-level plans such as comprehensive plans, hazard mitigation plans, or capital improvement plans.