Community Resilience Metrics

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 metrics. The goal of this project is to develop the tools necessary for communities to quantitatively assess their resilience over time based on a suite of community resilience indicators that account for meaningful aspects of the physical, social, and economic systems. The final methodology will include the following: selected priority indicators, the analytical approach(es) for computing each indicator over time in a relevant manner for at least one spatial scale, best practices for how the approach can be replicated for different spatial scales, public data sources for all indicators, data visualization for the indicators, multivariate analyses to examine relationships between indicators, sensitivity and uncertainty analysis, and validation studies.  

 

Research areas include, but are not limited to: performing validation studies, exploring methods for downscaling indicators, and identification of policies impacting resilience outcomes. The team is also interested in the quantitative measurement of disaster recovery for communities and organizations. The current approach relies on the use of secondary data alongside various statistical methods such as structural equation modeling, regression analysis, and cluster analysis. Important tools have been developed and are available to the research team to support this work; these include 1) Inventory of Community Resilience Indicators & Assessment Frameworks and 2) Tracking Community Resilience (TraCR) database. For more information see https://www.nist.gov/community-resilience/assessment-products

https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/development-first-generation-community-resilience-assessment-methodology

key words

Buildings; Infrastructure systems; Social systems; Community resilience; Metrics; Decision making; Systems modeling; Engineering; Social Science; Operations research; Mathematical programming; Systems analysis; Risk analysis; indicators; statistics; hazards and disaster research

Citizenship:  Open to U.S. citizens

Level:  Open to Postdoctoral applicants