Research Needs for Developing a Risk-Informed Methodology for Community Resilience

AbstractResilience has been defined as “the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events.” The term resilience is applied to a range of topics including physical security, business continuity, emergency planning, hazard mitigation, and the built environment’s (e.g., facilities, transportation systems, and utilities) ability to resist and rapidly recover from disruptive events. This paper focuses on research needs for achieving community resilience of the built environment. Community resilience depends upon the capacity of facilities and infrastructure systems to maintain acceptable levels of functionality during and after disruptive events and to recover full functionality within a specified period of time. Natural, technological, and human-made hazards in the United States continue to be responsible for significant losses and damage to the built environment. To improve the disaster resilience of communities to hazard events, each community needs to ...