Critical assessment of existing methodologies for measuring or representing community resilience of social and physical systems
This publication is the first of two reports on the NIST Community Resilience Assessment Methodology (CRAM) project. This report documents literature reviews and critical assessments of existing methodologies that can be used to measure or assess community resilience. The work was conducted under Task 2 of the CRAM project of the NIST Disaster and Failure Studies Program.
The overall objective of the CRAM task order is to “provide a technical foundation for the first generation methodology to assess resilience at the community scale.” The primary requirement for Task 2 is to “deliver a critical assessment (interim report) of existing methodologies to measure or represent community resilience of social and physical systems.”
A summary of the critical assessment approach is presented in Section 2, and detailed assessments of the nine existing methodologies are provided in Sections 3 through 11. Four methodologies specified in the task order statement of work are assessed in Sections 3 through 6: (3) the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) framework, (4) the Oregon Resilience Plan, (5) the United Nations Disaster Resilience Scorecard and (6) the Community Resilience System. Five additional methodologies selected by the project team in coordination with the NIST project manager are assessed in Sections 7 through 11: (7) the Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit (CART), (8) Baseline Resilience Indicators for Risk (BRIC), (9) the Rockefeller Foundation’s City Resilience Framework and City Resilience Index, (10) the Coastal Resilience Index and (11) the Hazus Loss Estimation Methodology. The critical assessment results for the nine existing methodologies are summarized in Section 12.
The report concludes with four appendices. Appendix A provides an annotated bibliography of seven additional community-based assessment methodologies that were identified and considered during the course of this task. The final three appendices present sector-specific literature reviews in the areas of electric power infrastructure (Appendix B), information and communications infrastructure (Appendix C), and transportation infrastructure (Appendix D). The intent of the final three appendices is to summarize the information contained in these sources and highlight relative strengths and weaknesses of the sectorspecific methodologies relative to the NIST CRAM effort. Where appropriate, these summaries highlight potentially useful and interesting ideas, information, resources that may be applicable within the context of general community planning.
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