Researcher-Community Partnerships for Application of Integrated Resilience Modeling in Planning

Community resilience is often considered the ability to prepare for anticipated hazards, adapt to changing conditions, and withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions. Nevertheless, the path US communities can take to achieve this overarching outcome is as varied as the hazards and composition of the communities themselves. Community resilience incorporates the performance of the built environment to serve and meet the changing social, economic, and broader civic needs of a communitys population over time. In the face of shifting hazards and long-term investments and decisions needed to address the complex and changing risks, communities face many technical and administrative challenges in resilience planning. To support community resilience planning under such conditions, NIST and the Center of Excellence for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning are developing integrated engineering-economic-social modeling capabilities through the IN-CORE modeling environment. The project embarks on a series of multi-year community partnerships to jointly enhance the utility and applicability of this integrated research and decision-support tool for real-world community resilience planning priorities and conditions. This partnership fosters a two-way collaboration between the research and local practitioner communities to (1) articulate specific community resilience modeling and planning priorities and requirements, (2) understand community preferences for utilizing and incorporating integrated IN-CORE modeling results for a range of planning outcomes, (3) advance the design and usability of IN-CORE as a community resilience decision support tool, and (4) provide a tangible demonstration of the value of collaborative partnerships in applied resilience research and tool-development. This presentation will share recent progress and findings from Center of Excellence community partnership workshops to identify specific applications of integrated resilience modeling in community planning and decision making. Further, it will share lessons and findings for future partnership efforts to bridge the gap between resilience modeling and research and practice for community-focused applications.