Community-Oriented Resilience Planning for the Built Environment

In 2015, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published the Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems (Guide) to provide flexible and objective guidance to communities seeking to develop a resilience plan that includes actionable goals to increase their resilience to natural hazards. The Guide sets forth a practical approach for communities to develop customized resilience plans that consider input from relevant stakeholders, consider the social dimensions of a community and the relationship to its physical elements (i.e. built environment), provide the ability to establish community-scale performance goals that encourage recovery-oriented planning, and recommend processes to implement and maintain community resilience plans over time and as community priorities evolve and change. The planning process encourages communities to identify their social functions as a fundamental element of developing a realistic and relevant plan that accurately reflects priorities for recovery after a hazard event.

Since the publication of Guide, communities, with the support of NIST researchers, have demonstrated various approaches to integrate elements of the Guide with their internal resilience planning processes and goals. Communities have used the Guide in conjunction with efforts to update hazard mitigation plans, in conjunction with climate change adaptation planning, and have personalized the planning process to meet their own unique vulnerabilities, hazard exposure, and needs. While the Guide provides a framework to guide planning processes, challenges remain to move planning efforts into implementation and expand the accessibility of resilience planning concepts and practices to all communities. This presentation will provide an overview of NIST's resilience planning guidance and core principles, implementation experiences to-date, and will reflect upon current and future challenges that will need to be addressed between the research and practitioner communities to increase future adoption of the concept of resilience planning for the built environment and infrastructure systems.