The Community Resilience Program (https://www.nist.gov/community-resilience) is developing science-based tools to assess resilience and support informed planning and decision making by communities. Active areas of research through a multi-disciplinary approach include:

Community Resilience Planning Guidance. A comprehensive systems approach to community resilience for physical, social, and economic systems includes (1) identifying infrastructure performance and recovery goals and the social and economic services and functions that they support; (2) assessing system performance, damage levels, and loss of functionality for hazard events; (3) characterizing dependencies among and between systems; (4) and determining the duration of recovery for physical, social, and economic systems and their impact on the community resilience. See the NIST guidance documents, NIST SP 1190 and NIST SP 1190GB-16, and related documents at https://www.nist.gov/community-resilience/planning-guide.  

Research areas include but are not limited to: Incorporating functional recovery into the performance metrics for the built environment; interdependencies between physical, social, and economic systems and functions; incorporating equity into the planning assessments and prioritization of solutions; methods to address climate effects as discrete events; methods to address chronic stressors; and natural or nature-based systems as part of community resilience.  

Community Resilience and Infrastructure Design. This project has two research focus areas: (a) To advance design and assessment methods for buildings and infrastructure to improve their ability to support social and economic functions and community resilience and (b) examine compatibility of design and planning practices for resilience, sustainability, and climate adaptation and their implications for resilience design practices. See https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/design-methods-resilient-community-systems  

Research areas include but are not limited to: Quantitative approaches to identify and evaluate the performance of the built environment; methods to identify and characterize interdependencies, cascading effects, consequences, and/or recovery of community services and functions for buildings and infrastructure systems; design and assessment criteria to bring community resilience goals into design practice.