Research Needs for Developing a Risk-Informed Methodology for Community Resilience

Abstract

Resilience has been defined as “the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events.” The term resilience is applied to a range of topics including physical security, business continuity, emergency planning, hazard mitigation, and the built environment’s (e.g., facilities, transportation systems, and utilities) ability to resist and rapidly recover from disruptive events. This paper focuses on research needs for achieving community resilience of the built environment. Community resilience depends upon the capacity of facilities and infrastructure systems to maintain acceptable levels of functionality during and after disruptive events and to recover full functionality within a specified period of time. Natural, technological, and human-made hazards in the United States continue to be responsible for significant losses and damage to the built environment. To improve the disaster resilience of communities to hazard events, each community needs to develop plans based on a risk-informed methodology that addresses multiple hazards, system performance levels, recovery of functionality, and dependencies between systems. However, quantitative tools and metrics and risk-informed guidance for communities are not presently available. A risk-informed methodology that supports decision making among alternatives for community resilience is proposed. Research needs are outlined for short-term and long-term development plans that are based on two national workshops in 2011. Research needs include risk-informed tools to support resilience planning at the community level, performance goals including functionality and recovery levels, multiple resilience levels, and standardized tools and metrics for community resilience and the built environment.