11045'-0.56"

7885'-5.39"

United States of America 

Legend:

 State Borders

 Major Highways

 Minor Roadways

 Major Cities

Total length of Interstate 

Highway System: 46,876 miles

Length of Mississippi River: 

2,340 miles

U.S. Disasters

Average Annual Landfalling 

hurricanes (Atlantic Basin): 1.7

Average earthquakes >5.0 

magnitude per year 

(2000-2010): 65.5

Average brush, grass and forest 

fres per year: 334,200

Average annual tornadoes: 

1,200 

United States of America

New York City

International Resilience Symposium

NIST GCR 15-917-37

This publication is available free of charge from:

http://dx.doi.org/10.6028/NIST.GCR.15-917-37

Understanding Standards for Communities and Built Infrastructure Resilience

Principal Investigator: Stephen E. Flynn, PhD

Director, Center for Resilience Studies

Co-Director, George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security

Northeastern University

Los Angeles

Population: 316 million

New York City 

Population: 

8.4 million

Los Angeles 

Population: 3.9 million

Chicago Population: 

2.7 million

Houston Population: 

2.1 million

Washington D.C. 

Population: 

646,449

68.3 square miles

Atlanta International Airport 

Annual Passenger Traffc:

94.4 million

Detroit – Ambassador Bridge: 

$500 million of trade crosses daily

The Great Lakes

Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior

contain 84% of North America’s surface fresh water

Total water volume in Great Lakes: 5,439 cubic miles

Population: 3.9 million Population: 8.4 million

Total Gulf Coast Oil Refning Capacity: 

8.1 million barrels per day (45% of US refnery capacity)

 

 

 

 

NIST GCR 15-917-37
%

International Resilience Symposium 

Understanding Standards for Communities and Built Infrastructure Resilience 

Prepared for 

U.S. Department of Commerce 

Engineering Laboratory 

National Institute of Standards and Technology 

Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8615 

By: 

Principal Investigator: Stephen E. Flynn, PhD 

Director, Center for Resilience Studies 

Co-Director, George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security 

Northeastern University 

This publication is available free of charge from: 

http://dx.doi.org/10.6028/NIST.GCR.15-917-37 

June 2015 

U.S. Department of Commerce 

Penny Pritzker, Secretary 

National Institute of Standards and Technology 

Willie May, Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and Director 



 	 

 

 


 


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International Resilience Symposium 

Understanding Standards for Communities and Built Infrastructure Resilience 

1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 6
 

2. THE NIST DISASTER RESILIENCE FRAMEWORK 6
 

3. PROCESS BACKGROUND AND DESIGN 7
 

Process Design 8
 

Participant Selection 8
 

Participant Preperation 8
 

4. PLENARY DISCUSSIONS 9
 

Plenary 1: Superstorm Sandy Case Study 9
 

Plenary 2: Community Resilience Trends 14
 

Plenary 3: Infrastructure Resilience Trends 15
 

Plenary 4: Creating Incentives For Resilience Investments 17
 

5. BREAKOUT DISCUSSIONS 20
 

Day 1, Work Groups A & D, Creating Infrastructure Resilience Standards 20
 

Day 1, Work Group B, Creating Community Resilience Standards 21
 

Day 1, Work Group C, Establishing And Adopting Resilience Standards 21
 

Day 2, Work Groups A & D, International Perspectives On Resilience Incentives And Global Issues 22
 

Day 2, Work Group B, Creating Policy Incentives For Resilience Investments 23
 

Day 2, Work Group C, Creating Economic Incentives For Resilience Investments 23
 

6. PARTICIPANT WHITE PAPERS 24
 

7. IMPORTANT THEMES THAT INFORM NIST’S DISASTER RESILIENCE FRAMEWORK 24
 

Community Functionality And Performance-Based Standards 24
 

Social Context 25
 

Regional Context 25
 

Incentives 26
 

APPENDIX A 27
 

APPENDIX B 32
 

APPENDIX C 35
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Northeastern University • Center for Resilience Studies 

1.0 Executive Summary 

Under President Obama’s Climate Action Plan, the National Institute of Standards 

and Technology (NIST) is developing a comprehensive, community-based 

disaster resilience framework. The disaster resilience framework is focused 

on buildings and lifeline infrastructures such as communications, water, and 

power supply. Resilience is inherently complex and involves interdependent 

capabilities within and across local, regional, national, and even international 

jurisdictions. Accordingly, the NIST framework includes such factors as societal 

needs, performance goals for buildings and infrastructure lifelines, emergency 

communication systems and plans, and economic factors. The framework 

aspires to inform and enhance the ability for communities and critical systems to 

better manage disruptions associated with human-made and naturally-occurring 

disasters. 

To assist the development of this framework, NIST has held a series of public 

workshops to hear from community leaders, private sector representatives, 

non-governmental representatives, owners and operators of infrastructure 

systems, and other community stakeholders. Input from these public workshops 

has helped to shape the content and approach of the framework. In addition 

to the public workshops, NIST commissioned Northeastern University’s Center 

for Resilience Studies at the George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland 

Security to convene an international symposium to draw on new research 

and global best practices that can inform the development of community and 

infrastructure resilience standards. Given the objective of having new resilience 

standards widely adopted, the international symposium was also asked to 

explore policy and fnancial incentives that would encourage communities to 

embrace them. These two topics – devising resilience standards and incentives 

– served as the organizing constructs around which the symposium participants, 

format, and discussions were designed. 

115 leaders from fourteen countries, representing private industry, academia, 

fnance, insurance, policy, non-profts and government attended and actively 

participated in the two-day session. 

Four plenary panel sessions were organized to frame the important issues 

involved with establishing and implementing resilience standards and serve as the 

basis for discussions at breakout workgroup events. 

The frst plenary session highlighted important lessons from Superstorm Sandy 

to include unanticipated cascading failures arising from storm damage to multiple 

interdependent infrastructure systems. Superstorm Sandy demonstrated the 

important stakes involved with advancing infrastructure and community resilience. 

The lessons drew from four previous symposia dedicated to uncovering 

national-level fndings and recommendations from Sandy that was conducted by 

Northeastern University and other university partners with funding support from 

the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. 

Plenary 2 looked at the general trends in community resilience and the current 

societal barriers for creating new resilience standards. Plenary 3 focused on 

the nation’s built infrastructure and the role that metrics and standards could 

play in increasing resilience. Plenary 4 examined the critical aspect of devising 

incentives for local and state governments and the private business sector to 

invest in measures that will bolster community and infrastructure resilience. 

With the plenary discussions as refective and thought-provoking backdrops, 

breakout sessions were designed to engage participants in distilling the most 

important issues that should be considered by NIST in developing resilience 

standards and in supporting incentives that would stimulate their adoption and 

use by local communities. 

Over two days of very intense and wide ranging discussions, this diverse group of 

•	, Resilience building efforts need to focus on devising performance-based 

standards that better assure the continuity of functions that are critical to the 

safety and well-being of communities. 

•	, Performance-based community standards should acknowledge the regional 

and multi-jurisdictional context within which lifeline infrastructures operate. 

•	, Standards for built infrastructure need to go beyond addressing the relevant 

technical and engineering issues to include the wider social context within 

which decisions about the built environment are made. 

•	, There are currently insuffcient incentives to stimulate the creation and 

adoption of standards; in fact, there are signifcant barriers that must be 

overcome. 

These four consensus themes can be highly useful to NIST in informing the 

successful development of the fnal community-based resilience framework. 

2.0 The NIST Disaster Resilience 

Framework 

According to NIST1, the purpose of the Disaster Resilience Framework is to: 

•	, Defne community-based disaster resilience for the built environment; 

•	, Identify consistent performance goals and metrics for buildings and 

infrastructure and lifeline systems to enhance community resilience; 

•	, Identify existing standards, codes, guidelines, and tools that can be 

implemented to enhance resilience; and 

•	, Identify gaps in current standards, codes, and tools that if successfully 

addressed, can lead to enhanced resilience. 

At present, NIST’s framework begins with a discussion of “community” (based 

on Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory), which acknowledges how 

critical it is that a community and its systems possess the ability to respond to 

its functional and social needs following a disaster.2 These functions and social 

needs can be categorized, at least initially, in three groups: 

•	, Human or Social/Cultural services 

•	, Healthcare (physical and mental health) 

•	, Education 

•	, Local governance 

•	, Social services (e.g., welfare) 

•	, Public safety and security, including emergency management 

•	, Arts and recreation 

•	, Spiritual 

•	, Economic or Business/Industry services 

•	, Financial 

•	, Businesses 

•	, Industry (including agriculture and manufacturing) 

•	, Trade 

•	, Physical/Environmental Services 

•	, Transportation 

•	, Natural Environment 

•	, Water/wastewater 

•	, Energy 

•	, Communications 

•	, Housing 

•	, Air Quality 

1	 The NIST Disaster Resilience Framework Document can be found at http://www.nist.gov/el/building_ 

materials/resilience/framework.cfm global resilience thought leaders coalesced around four themes with implications 

for the NIST resilience framework:	 2 NIST Disaster Resilience Framework Chapter 2: http://www.nist.gov/el/building_materials/resilience/ 

upload/Disaster_Resilience_Chapter_2-Community_50-Draft_102014.pdf 

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2.0 The NIST Disaster Resilience Framework 

The framework also posits that when these three groups of services are able to 

meet the needs of individuals, households, and groups within a given community, 

the needs of the community as a whole are satisfed. Building off of Abraham 

Maslow’s seminal work, NIST’s framework suggests that these needs are 

hierarchical, moving from survival, safety and security, to belonging and then 

growth and achievement. When a disaster disrupts a community, the priorities for 

restoration and recovery of functions typically follow this hierarchy (Figure 1). 

Figure 1. NIST’s Hierarchy of Community Needs 

NIST proposes performance goals for community functions that fall under 

three hazard levels (routine, expected, and extreme events). This approach 

recognizes: 1) there are a range of functions that must be available to meet 

communities’ needs, 2) those needs can be arranged in a hierarchical order, 

and 3) the recovery process involves distinct time intervals (Response: 0-3 days; 

Workforce/Neighborhood Recovery: 1 to 12 weeks; Community Recovery: 4 to 

36+ months). These performance goals defne the “desired performance of a 

particular social system within a community and the requirements of that system 

within a particular time frame during the recovery process.”3 

Because so many of the fundamental needs of the hierarchy are met by physical/ 

environmental functions, the majority of the NIST framework is devoted to 

performance goals for the built environment. These goals “become the metrics 

for resilience, and are used to compare to the existing conditions to defne gaps 

that represent opportunities for improvement.”4 Specifcally, the framework 

addresses the development of performance goals for Buildings, Transportation, 

Energy, Communication and Information, Water and Wastewater systems with 

additional attention devoted to infrastructure interdependencies and cascading 

effects, as well as economic considerations that impact these performance goals. 

The goal of this framework is to provide standards and metrics which, if adopted, 

will help communities to consistently meet their functional needs before, during 

and after disaster disruptions. 

The development of this framework has been informed by a series of public 

workshops that have allowed NIST to hear from community leaders, private 

sector representatives, non-governmental representatives, owners and operators 

of infrastructure systems, and other community stakeholders. NIST decided 

to supplement these U.S.-based workshops with an international symposium 

and commissioned Northeastern University’s Kostas Research Institute for 

Homeland Security and the Center for Resilience Studies, along with their 

partner, Meridian Institute, to organize, convene and lead a two-day event that 

3 NIST Disaster Resilience Framework Chapter 2: http://www.nist.gov/el/building_materials/resilience/ 

upload/Disaster_Resilience_Chapter_2-Community_50-Draft_102014.pdf 

4 NIST Disaster Resilience Framework Chapter 3: http://www.nist.gov/el/building_materials/resilience/ 

upload/Disaster_Resilience_Chapter_3_Community_50-Draft_102014.pdf 

included researchers and policy makers from fourteen countries. The Kostas 

Institute and Center for Resilience Studies (CRS) are leaders in resilience theory 

and application and in the built environment.The Meridian Institute, through 

its Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) and other work has 

been an active leader in informing and advancing community and infrastructure 

resilience for the better part of a decade. 

Identifying policy and fnancial incentives that will help encourage early and 

widespread community adoption of resilience standards was another key 

imperative that animated the convening of this international symposium. 

3.0 Process Background and Design 

As the event sponsor, NIST’s overarching objective for the international 

symposium was to have successful practices and standards from other countries 

inform U.S. domestic efforts to advance community resilience. To this end, the 

panels and workshops were designed to provide NIST staff with knowledgeable 

viewpoints from global experts on key questions relating to the creation and use 

of resilience standards. The participants were drawn from a variety of domains 

and viewpoints – researchers, community practitioners, government, policy and 

private sector. In addition, sponsors and organizers desired that the Symposium 

be constructed to stimulate active participant engagement – as opposed to more 

typical symposia relying on long presentations and delivery of formal papers. 

Additionally, NIST saw the value of leveraging the 18-month effort to examine 

the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy for lessons learned that was led by the 

Kostas/CRS/Meridian team. This case study helped to “ground” the Symposium 

discussions by highlighting the signifcant societal stakes associated with 

meeting the resilience imperative. Indeed, insights from the largely unanticipated 

cascading failures of lifeline infrastructure sectors and the post-Sandy recovery 

provide a compelling national “teachable moment.” The need for new practices, 

collaborations, policies and investments that advance the development and 

adoption of resilience standards could not be more timely. 

Armed with this mandate, the organizers focused their energies on meeting 

the four requirements of a successful symposium: 1) designing well-calibrated 

sessions for investigating the selected topics; 2) enlisting moderators and 

facilitators who are able to successfully stimulate thoughtful conversations among 

participants; 3) actively recruiting a highly selective group of participants who can 

provide the diversity, knowledge, and experience necessary to effectively address 

the topics; and 4) conducting signifcant pre-event outreach and engagement 

with panelists, discussants, and participants so that everyone arrives prepared to 

make meaningful contributions towards meeting the program’s objectives. 

The Kostas/CRS/Meridian team devised four questions around which the 

Symposium was organized: 

1. What are the practical, measurable standards for community resilience? 

2. What are the practical, measurable standards for infrastructure and 

buildings resilience? 

3. What processes should be created to adopt and implement standards for 

community, infrastructure and buildings resilience? 

4. What political, economic, and social incentives can be created that would 

cause signifcant investment by the public sector, private sector, and the 

individuals in bolstering community, infrastructure, and buildings resilience? 

With these framing questions in mind, organizers determined that a two-day 

format would provide optimal time for information sharing and discussion. Day 

One focused on the introduction of the Superstorm Sandy case study and issues 

surrounding developing community and infrastructure standards. Day Two 

focused on policy and fnancial incentives for widespread adoption of standards 

and integrating international perspectives. The symposium beneftted from 

having the NIST conference facility serve as the venue. This outstanding facility 

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Northeastern University • Center for Resilience Studies 

reduced the “transaction time” that goes with moving participants between 

sessions, dining, breaks, etc. It also provided an excellent environment for 

maximizing the opportunity for participants to engage in both the formal session 

discussions as well as more informal networking and information sharing during 

breaks. 

Process Design 

The Kostas/CRS/Meridian team devised a process for inquiry and discussion 

that drew on the knowledge and insights of all the attendees. The Symposium’s 

topically divided structure used plenary panels over the two days to frame key 

issues regarding community and infrastructure resilience standards and then 

convened work group sessions to allow participants to engage more deeply on 

key questions of the resilience standards. 

Four panels of leading experts were used to “tee up” key issues for the three 

framing elements: Superstorm Sandy as a salient event to ground discussions of 

standards and incentives; issues related to developing standards for community 

and infrastructure resilience; and issues related to devising incentives for the 

adoption and implementation of resilience standards. Panels were moderated by 

Dr. Stephen Flynn and Mr. Warren Edwards who led panelists in conversational 

dialogues regarding key issues. With the exception of the opening session to 

present the Superstorm Sandy case study, there were no formal presentations or 

papers. Instead, panels, moderators and participants engaged in a structured 

conversation that highlighted elements to be focused on in working sessions. 

The use of small working group “breakout” sessions provided a way to draw on 

the expertise of all the participants in generating ideas and recommendations. As 

with the panel discussions, working sessions did not use formal presentations. 

Rather, each group was led by a facilitator and assisted by two to three lead 

discussants who were pre-selected from the participants assigned to that work 

group. Each day had four working groups: 

• Day One 

• Infrastructure Resilience Standards A 

• Community Resilience Standards B 

• Establishing and Adapting Resilience Standards C 

• Infrastructure Resilience Standards D 

• Day Two 

• International Perspectives on Resilience Standards and Incentives A 

• Policy Incentives to Support Resilience Standards B 

• Economic Incentives to Support Resilience Standards C 

• International Perspectives on Resilience Standards and Incentives D 

The team developed specifc discussion questions that each work group would 

address, ensuring robust discussion of the critical issues. Reporting back to 

the assembled plenary, work groups were asked to identify two to four key 

discussion points from their deliberations and three to fve action steps the 

group would recommend for consideration by NIST. Appendix A provides the 

overall annotated Symposium Agenda; Appendix B presents the key discussion 

elements for each of the eight work groups. 

Participant Selection 

With this format and process design, the Kostas/CRS/Meridian team assembled 

an impressive participant roster that drew from a range of community domains 

and viewpoints, anchored in the U.S. community resilience experience. More 

than 100 leaders from U.S. private industry, academia, fnance, insurance, nonprofts, policy and government were selected for invitation to the Symposium; 

approximately 90 were able to attend and participate in the two-day session. 

While the outcomes of the discussions were geared towards informing the 

development of U.S. resilience standards, organizers also gathered notable 

resilience theorists, researchers and practitioners from around the world, with 

approximately 25 international representatives participating in Symposium 

discussions, bringing the total participation to 115. 

The backgrounds and experiences of the potential invitees were carefully 

reviewed and outstanding participants were identifed who could serve as 

panelists and help to set the tone of the overall Symposium and surface insightful 

themes. Others were specifcally identifed to serve as lead discussants in the 

work groups, ensuring that vibrant and thoughtful conversations were sparked 

in the smaller sessions. Several additional participants with special experiences 

or knowledge were asked to provide written input following the meetings. These 

white papers were to build off meeting discussions, incorporating their personal 

knowledge of community and infrastructure resilience – thus, providing a more 

organized and documented response to the questions of the Symposium. 

Appendix C provides copies of these white papers. Altogether, approximately 

60 of the attendees engaged in discussions and input as a panelist, discussant, 

or writer – an exceptional mix of active engagement that contributed to robust 

discussion and thoughtful recommendations throughout the process. 

Participant Preparation 

The organizing team worked with each of the participants in advance of the 

Symposium to ensure that all arrived having thought ahead about the topics and 

issues. This preparation included extensive pre-Symposium communications, the 

development of a package of read-ahead materials, and interviews with selected 

participants to help develop common understanding of Symposium goals and 

outcomes and to identify key knowledge or learning that would helpfully inform 

the event’s proceedings. 

The organizing team developed a website for registration and Symposium 

information and provided annotated agendas which helped describe the focus 

of Symposium discussions, desired outcomes, and key issues. The Kostas/ 

CRS staff prepared extensive and thought-provoking read-ahead materials that 

helped to highlight key issues and provided a common knowledge base for all 

participants. Importantly, the read-ahead package included the current draft of 

the NIST framework so that all the participants arrived having a solid sense of 

how the Symposium discussions would best support NIST’s overall mandate. 

Finally, and most importantly, one-on-one pre-interviews were arranged by the 

Kostas/CRS/Meridian team with all the participants who were selected to be 

either panelists or discussants. For the panelists, these interviews involved a 

minimum of 30-minute discussions to assist the moderators in understanding 

the details of the panelists’ experiences and knowledge base, supported the 

moderators in constructing questions that would effectively highlight key issues, 

and allowed panelists to provide their unique perspectives on many of the thorny 

issues surrounding devising resilience standards and the need for generating 

meaningful incentives. For those discussants and participants who were asked to 

produce white papers, these interviews focused on helping them to understand in 

advance the process design, their roles as discussants, and the specifc elements 

on which they would be asked to provide their written refections. This approach 

ensured that all those who were formally asked to address the Symposium 

had time to think about important examples, details, practices, or policies that 

would be helpful in creating resilience standards or incentives. Together, these 

pre-Symposium interviews prepared participants to arrive ready to engage, set a 

conversational tone that could be built upon in the formal Symposium sessions, 

and gave the participants time to develop more meaningful input. Further, the 

insights and examples gained from these interviews provided yet another source 

of input to inform the fnal Symposium outcomes. 

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4.0 Plenary Discussions 

4.0 Plenary Discussions 

Each plenary panel session was designed to frame the important issues involved 

with establishing and implementing resilience standards. The Symposium 

opened with a panel of leading researchers who had studied the aftermath of 

Superstorm Sandy to identify lessons that could usefully inform the advancement 

of critical infrastructure resilience. The specifc fndings and observations that 

this panel presented provided tangible examples of where standards might have 

helped mitigate storm-related disruptions and post-storm delays in recovery. 

The panel also provided the participants with a compelling recent example of a 

major disaster around which ideas for potential standards might be realistically 

refected. The second panel discussed current trends in community resilience, 

with experts helping to both provide context and to surface issues that should be 

considered in the working group sessions in devising recommendations for NIST 

on the development of community resilience standards. The third panel played 

a similar role in framing issues and approaches to creating resilience standards 

for the built environment. The fnal panel explored questions regarding the need 

for and the mechanics of creating incentives to stimulate early and widespread 

adoption and use of resilience standards. What follows are the highlights of the 

panel conversations and commentary. 

Plenary 1: Superstorm Sandy Case Study 

Background 

The frst plenary session of the Symposium presented Superstorm Sandy as a 

case study that could usefully inform a discussion of many of the challenges of 

building infrastructure resilience. While the subsequent Symposium plenary and 

working group session went well beyond this one example, this examination 

of a specifc, recent disaster helped to ground the Symposium participants in 

the complex political, economic and social environments that surround any 

large-scale catastrophic event. Specifcally, the plenary session provided an 

overview of the post-Sandy resilience lessons learned generated by four major 

workshops led by Northeastern University and convened at Columbia, NYU, 

Stevens Institute of Technology, and the Wharton School with funding from the 

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Stephen Flynn, Director of the Center for Resilience 

Studies, and principal investigator for this project, provided an overview of this 

signifcant disaster and moderated the session. The four co-organizers of the 

Sloan workshops discussed the major fndings and recommendations from each 

of the workshops. 

Overview of the Superstorm Sandy Case Study 

Superstorm Sandy was important both because of the scale of the event and 

because it struck one of the most complex and concentrated metropolitan 

regions in the United States. Sandy brought the resilience challenge into stark 

relief, to include generating the need to create more resilient infrastructure as 

a part of the recovery effort. It also reinforced our understanding of many of 

the current barriers for investing in building more resilient infrastructures and 

communities. These barrieres include: 

•	, There is a pervasive lack of recognition about the current inability to 

adequately handle foreseeable risks and uncertainties. Current capabilities 

for coping with disasters are grossly overestimated and there is a bias 

that discounts leading indicators of future disruptive events. Additionally, 

stationarity assumptions that were embraced in 20th Century designs are 

obsolete. Often, elected offcials view publicly acknowledging risks to be 

a political liability if they believe they lack suffcient resources to adequately 

respond to those risks. 

•	, Too few incentives exist to create resilience. There are few rewards for 

investment and in too many cases there are actually penalties. Society values 

routine effciency and optimization over investments in continuity of function in 

the face of anticipated and unexpected disruptions. Transferring risk and not 

working collaboratively to take risk on directly has become common practice. 

It is not clear how to measure resilience so rewarding efforts to enhance it is 

inherently diffcult. 

•	, Consensus on how to measure resilience does not exist. There are a lot 

of isolated stories in disparate domains but not yet an overall set of best 

practices for resilience. Various academic disciplines provide insight but an 

integrative framework is still lacking. 

•	, There are organizational or governance barriers to creating resilience. Among 

them are the facts that lifeline infrastructures (e.g., transportation, energy, 

communications and water) are almost always regional; infrastructure 

sectors are inherently interdependent; and regional infrastructure sectors are 

vulnerable to multiple hazards. Yet in the face of these facts, society remains 

organized around state and local jurisdictions, individual infrastructure sectors, 

and too often, myopically focused only on the most recent hazard that the 

community experienced. 

Superstorm Sandy was a knowable event. The mindset that envisions random, 

rare and unknowable events can sometimes obscure the fact that these events 

are often not so rare. Hurricanes have approached and hit the eastern seaboard 

many times before and will again. The fact that they usually hit around the Outer 

Banks area of North Carolina and southward does not negate the knowledge 

that they have also moved much further north and periodically struck New York 

and New Jersey. There are tools to understand the likely consequences of these 

events on the built environment. It is possible to anticipate how water that is 

pushed by wind and tide is likely to food specifc locations. In complacency, 

however, Superstorm Sandy was largely imagined to be a relatively minor wind 

event and not the major water event it became. 

An example of one company who largely got it right was Goldman Sachs, which 

stacked 25,000 sandbags around their corporate headquarters in Manhattan, 

located just a block away from the Hudson River. This signifcant effort paid 

real dividends when after the foodwater receded, their building was one of the 

few in lower Manhattan not to incur major water damage. However, because 

the surrounding transportation and energy infrastructures were not adequately 

protected, Goldman Sachs found that most of their employees were unable to 

come to work. Many of their employees’ homes were damaged, roads were 

closed, transportation systems were inoperative and without reliable electricity 

and communications, telecommuting was not possible. Their foresight and 

investment in safeguarding their headquarters was rendered partially ineffective 

because of the failure of regional, interdependent systems that were outside their 

direct control. 

Figure 2. Goldman Sachs’ Manhattan office prepares for Superstorm Sandy’s storm 

surge with sandbags piled high. Source: Victor J. Blue, Bloomberg 

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Northeastern University • Center for Resilience Studies 

Other examples abound. Verizon headquarters did not invest adequately in 

food protection and suffered serious water damage. This was compounded 

by the failure of a drowned air compressor that was mistakenly located in the 

basement cable vault. The air compressor existed solely to keep the conduit 

that surrounded their copper telecommunications lines under pressure so that 

water would not seep into the cable should they be exposed to food water. 

However, because the compressor was co-located with the cables, it failed 

once foodwaters entered the basement. The result was multi-million dollars in 

damages that could have been avoided if the air compressor had been placed on 

a higher foor. 

The transit systems in the metro-New York/New Jersey region were particularly 

vulnerable to storm surge but reacted in very different ways. The New York 

Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) took both physical and operational 

actions to mitigate damage and recover quickly. First, they positioned their trains 

in areas safer from fooding. Second, they realized that many MTA employees 

would have a very diffcult time commuting to their workplace following the 

storm. As a result of that understanding, the MTA director authorized overtime in 

advance for all the employees who agreed to stay on the job including the time 

they would need to sleep – and he provided them with bunks to sleep on. As a 

result, virtually the entire MTA workforce was on-hand to support the response 

and recovery both during and after the storm. 

Unfortunately, the leadership of the New Jersey Transit System ended up 

focusing on the lesson they learned from their most recent experience with a 

hurricane and prepared for a wind event instead of a water event. A year before, 

when Hurricane Irene struck the region, the system had moved much of their train 

feet into central New Jersey to get them out of the food zones. However, while 

their was little fooding from Irene, the storm generated wind damage to many 

of the power lines which translated into many of these trains being stranded far 

away from their most active routes for several days. For Sandy, New Jersey 

Transit decided to reduce the risk of having service disrupted by wind-damaged 

power lines by this time ordering that the trains be placed near Hoboken and 

the Meadowlands. But these locations are both in low-lying areas that were 

very exposed to fooding by storm surge. As a result, 345 train cars suffered 

signifcant damage. 

What are some key lessons to be drawn from Sandy? First and foremost is the 

imperative to begin taking a Resilience-Centric Approach to safeguarding critical 

infrastructure and communities. This means: 

•	, Distinguishing amongst elemental capacities, essential functions and full or 

normal functions 

•	, Identifying and adopting resilience design features, processes, and protocols 

that together mitigate the risk of disruption and speed recovery when 

mitigation measures fail 

•	, Weighing resilience design options that include: 

•	, Cushionability – the graceful degradation of non-essential functions during 

periods of stress 

•	, Resistance – redirecting threats and hazards away from elemental 


capacities and essential functions
 

•	, Robustness – hardening elemental capacities and essential functions 

•	, Redundancy – having spares to provide elemental capacities and essential 

functions 

•	, Graceful Extensibility – creating the capacity for the infrastructure to adapt 

to deal with an uncertain future 

Vastly improving communities’ ability to put resilience into practice is vital. This 

must be done in all phases of disaster planning, response and recovery. 

•	, Pre-event communities need: 

•	, Better modeling, particularly visual models that can transmit the right story 

to decision makers and help them make “what-if” decisions in advance of 

disasters 

•	, Resilient design based on both predictive risk and surprise rather than 

solely on experienced risk 

•	, Creative and effective incentives for investing in resilience measures 

•	, Better, more realistic, and more frequent contingency planning and 


exercises
 

•	, An enhanced ability to maintain situational awareness prior to, during, and 

after a disaster 

•	, During the event it is necessary to be resourceful. Decision-making 

and actions should be done nimbly and competently so as to mitigate 

consequences and to support rapid recovery. 

•	, In the aftermath of events, communities must: 

•	, Restore elemental capacities and essential functions in a rapid and 


integrated manner
 

•	, Restore full/normal functions as rapidly as possible 

•	, Learn from the event, adapt and improve resilience design accordingly 

Discussion and Significant Recommendations from the 

Bolstering Energy Resilience Workshop 

Stephen Flynn outlined one of the major lessons learned from a workshop 

hosted by New York University’s International Center for Enterprise Preparedness 

(InterCEP): 

Figure 3. Superstorm Sandy knocked out power to over 2 million New Yorkers. 

Source: Iwan Baan, New York Magazine 

In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, over 8 million people were affected by 

power outages across the metro-New York/New Jersey region. Without reliable 

access to power most other infrastructure systems are unable to operate or do 

not operate effectively. 

Access to fuel was a huge problem. The region's fuel system is large, complex 

and little understood by most decision makers who are not directly involved in 

the operation of the system. In addition to local refneries, most of which are on 

or in close proximity to shorelines and are therefore vulnerable to storm surge 

and power outages, much of the fuel for the region comes through pipelines 

that originate from as far away as the Gulf Coast or is transported by sea on 

oil tankers and by tugs and barges. The New York and New Jersey region 

consumes on average 42 million gallons of fuel a day. Vessels that transit to the 

port of New York and New Jersey provide over 60 percent of that fuel, regional 

refneries provide approximate 20 percent, and 15 percent arrives by pipeline. In 

the immediate aftermath of the storm, decision makers were slow to realize that 

the entire fuel supply distribution system had essentially collapsed. This was 

partly due to the fact that few public offcials, including emergency managers, 

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4.0 Plenary Discussions 

understood just how the systems worked. It was also due to these offcials 

receiving conficting and incorrect information. Successfully managing the 

disruption of the fuel system was hampered by a general lack of awareness of the 

interdependency of lifeline infrastructures and the cascading effects generated 

by a major disaster. Gasoline stations cannot operate without the power and 

telecommunications networks that support them. Emergency crews need fuel for 

their vehicles in order to assess damage and make repairs. 

The bottom line is that an inadequate understanding of complex, interdependent 

energy systems inhibits appropriate resilience investments and reduces the 

effectiveness of disaster planning, response and recovery. 

Figure 4. Modeling the elements of the oil supply chain. Source: American Petroleum 

Institute 

Discussion and Significant Recommendations from the 

Health Systems and Services Workshop 

David Abramson, Assistant Director, National Center for Disaster Preparedness, 

Columbia University, provided a summary of the insights and recommendations 

developed at the post-Sandy workshop on resilient health systems and services. 

These included the following: 

During and in the immediate aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, about 10 percent 

of New York City’s hospitals’ bed capacity was lost. Since there are 58 acute 

care hospitals in the metro-New York area, that loss to the health system was 

substantial. Even hospitals that were not evacuated were severely strained and 

exhibited signifcant creativity and inventiveness, but the system turned out to 

be far more vulnerable to disruption than planners had anticipated. Most of 

the successes were the result of individual facility and staff heroism and not the 

inherent resilience of the medical system. Outside of the hospital system, the 

failures refected even less resilience. Shelters flled with unexpected patients 

from nursing homes without medical records or required medications and many 

of them were not able to explain their conditions to shelter personnel. 

The challenges that the metro-New York health systems faced in the aftermath 

of Superstorm Sandy highlighted a signifcant challenge for health systems 

nationwide. Increasingly, the majority of patients are no longer receiving medical 

care primarily in hospital settings. Instead, that care is being dispersed through 

a community in nursing homes, adult care facilities, dialysis centers, outpatient 

clinics, and via home health care. However, most regulations that govern the 

management of disasters impose standards almost exclusively on hospitals. 

What this translates into is that for most major disasters, the community health 

care system is woefully unprepared and inadequately resourced to handle 

the large load placed on it before, during and after a storm. This includes the 

stress induced by the planned evacuation, discharge or movement of patients 

from hospitals into the community prior to a storm making landfall. Indeed, in 

preparation for or in response to a major disaster, there is a strong incentive for 

hospitals to transfer their patient load into the community for community health 

service providers to manage. Too often, this has the effect of moving patients 

from a highly regulated environment into a much less regulated environment 

without the support structures to manage the surge. Patients often arrive at 

community care facilities without medical records or medications. These facilities 

are likely to have an inadequate supply of trained health care professionals on 

hand. (For example, many health care providers not affliated with a hospital in 

the NY/NJ area had no credentials that identifed them as essential personnel. 

As a result, they were unable to get gasoline for their vehicle or get past police 

barricades to gain access to their patients.) Elderly patients from nursing homes 

and adult home facilities are often evacuated to shelters with no capability to 

adequately care for them and few resources to meet their special needs. 

Some of the standards that are most relevant to community health resilience in a 

disaster that came from the health systems and services workshop included: 

•	, Ensuring an adequate health provider workforce during and after the event. 

This includes providing support to manage their personal family circumstances 

and issuing credentials so that they are in a position to report to work during 

and following a disaster. 

•	, Ensuring robust and effective communications among the various sectors 

of the health care system. This includes transportability and transparency 

of medical records and medication requirements as well as physical 

communications links when most normal systems are not functioning. It also 

includes general risk communication to the public at large to ensure that an 

additional health emergency does not arise during the crisis (how to handle 

contaminated water, for instance). 

•	, Ensuring the reliability of energy to maintain required medical technologies and 

both hospitals and other health care facilities that provide essential medical 

services (i.e., dialysis center, radiation treatment centers, etc.). 

•	, Ensuring the continuity of other lifeline infrastructure including water, 

wastewater and sewage. 

Other considerations that deserve additional study and emphasis are: 

•	, How does the built environment contribute to risk mitigation and resistance 

efforts in the public health care system? 

•	, What are the most relevant considerations for patient evacuation or shelter in 

place decisions? 

•	, What are the human measures of a resilient public health care system – 

mortality; excess morbidity; individual and household recovery? 

Discussion and Significant Recommendations from the 

Developing Economic Incentives for Advancing 

Howard Kunreuther, Co-Director, and Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Executive Director, 

of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Process Center provided a 

synopsis of the incentives workshop. 

One of the primary questions in building infrastructure resilience is, “who pays?” 

Normally this implies a risk management approach – the need to quantify the risk 

to the infrastructure and understand what is now known about that risk. That risk 

assessment is followed by considering the options – what are they now and what 

might they be in the next fve to ten years? Then, who are the public and private 

partners that can be brought to the table to make these options real? 

Superstorm Sandy ranks ffth amongst the most costly global disasters over the 

past 60 years. In fact, most of the largest disasters have occurred in the past 

10 years and Sandy was not an outlier. It is essential to determine who is paying 

for the costs associated with recovery. The Stafford Act that governs major 

disasters in the United States allows state governors to request a Presidential 

Disaster Declaration, which gives them access to federal funds to cover a portion 

of the losses the state incurred. That portion has grown in recent years. In 

Hurricane Diane (1955) the federal government paid for 5 percent of the losses; in 

Hurricane Hugo (1989), 25 percent; in Hurricane Katrina (2005), 50 percent; and 

for Superstorm Sandy (2012), 80 percent (See fgure 5). However, the speed at 

which this emergency assistance is approved by the federal government is also 

changing. After Katrina, it took 3 days for the government to release $10.5 billion 

with an additional $50 billion in a few weeks. After Superstorm Sandy, it took 

3 months for the U.S. Congress to release funding. In today’s highly polarized 

political climate, rapid appropriation to meet even large catastrophes is not 

assured. 

11 
Hurricane Diane

1955

Total Damage

184 deaths and $832 million

Hurricane Hugo

1989

Damage in US

21 deaths and $8 billion 

Total Damage

50 deaths and $9 billion

Hurricane Katrina

2005

Total Damage

1,800 deaths and $150 billion

Hurricane Sandy

2012

Total Damage

147 deaths and $50 billion

Hurricane Ike

2008

Total Damage

84 deaths and $18.8 billion

24.1m 31.2m 32.9m 32.4m

22.1m 31.9m 34.4m 36.8m

12.4m 29.5m 36.2m 42.6m

15.6m 27.8m 32.6m 37.4m

1950 1990 2000 2010

Northeast

Mid Atlantic

Southeast

Gulf Coast

Rhode Island

Massachusettes

New York

Connecticut

New Hampshire

Vermont

Maine

Delaware

Maryland

Virginia

New Jersey

Pennsylvania

Washington D.C.

Florida

North Carolina

South Carolina

Georgia

Texas

Mississippi

Louisiana

Alabama

Northeastern University • Center for Resilience Studies

12

In addition to the issue of who pays, there is also the question of how the money 

will be used. There is a trade-off between restoring damaged property to its 

pre-disaster condition, and investing the time and often the additional expenses 

of rebuilding with additional resilience. The legislation governing storm assistance 

for Superstorm Sandy for the frst time authorized FEMA and other federal 

agencies to fund reconstruction that includes new mitigation measures. But this 

effort has been complicated by the lack of agreed upon resilience-enhancing 

standards. 

The growing uncertainty about the process associated with the extent and 

timeliness of post-disaster fnancial assistance as well as the lack of agreed upon 

standards to inform rebuilding efforts, works against building greater societal 

resilience. 

Another barrier to investing in resilience is “availability bias” and imperfect 

information that translates into leaders, individuals and communities often 

misperceiving the likelihood of a disaster occurring and of its consequences. 

Leaders are often myopic and exhibit a “Not in My Term of Offce” (NIMTOF) 

mentality. 

In the face of these challenges, insurance can provide a potentially helpful 

antidote. Insurance often ends up encouraging investment in adaptation or 

mitigation measures by offsetting those investments with lower premiums since 

they lower the insurer’s exposure to the risk of large losses. 

The Wharton School’s Center of Risk Management and Decision Processes has 

identifed two governing principles for insurance to be used as a more effective 

catalyst for advancing resilience:

Figure 5. As coastal populations and storm intensity increase, so too does the cost of natural disasters. Source: CRS analysis of National Weather Service, NOAA 

and U.S. Census data
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4.0 Plenary Discussions 

•	, Insurance premiums should refect risk. This provides signals to infrastructure 

owners regarding the hazards they face and encourages investments in costeffective adaptation measures to reduce vulnerability to catastrophe. 

•	, In order to deal with equity and affordability issues, governments must assist 

communities in high hazard areas that may need special treatment. This 

assistance may be in the form of low interest loans or grants to accomplish 

adaptation and mitigation providing an incentive to upgrade facilities before 

the next disaster. 

In general, insurance markets help spread risk and often provide incentives to 

reduce risk. Insurers can also encourage deliberative thinking for themselves and 

their policyholders by providing short-term incentives for acting now rather than 

waiting. Superstorm Sandy provides an opportunity to reevaluate the roles that 

insurance and adaptation measures and standards can play in reducing future 

loss to infrastructure. 

Discussion and Significant Recommendations from the 

Bolstering Transportation Resilience Workshop 

Michael Bruno (Dean, Schaefer School of Engineering and Science, Stevens 

Institute of Technology) provided lessons learned from the post-Sandy 

transportation resilience workshop. 

Bruno told the story of an insightful occurrence when the directors of the New 

York City MTA and the New Jersey Transit Authority sat next to each other, and 

related their experiences: The New Jersey offcial had been severely criticized for 

his actions in preparing for a wind and not a water event and the subsequent loss 

of transportation capability by fooding. The director of the MTA said, “Do you 

know what the difference between being a hero or not is? It is 10 miles per hour.” 

The MTA director had predicted a storm surge event and had positioned many of 

the MTA trains on elevated tracks with considerable wind exposure while the NJ 

director had assumed a wind event and positioned much of his rolling stock in 

wind protected but food prone areas. If the forecast had been a little off – more 

wind, less water – their situations would have been reversed with New Jersey 

Transit ending up getting the praise. 

Over the past 60 years, Sandy ranks 5th globally in terms 

of economic damage with estimated costs of $50 billion. 

Others with higher costs are: the 2011 Japan Tsunami, $210 

billion; Hurricane Katrina in 2005, $125 billion; the Japan 

earthquake in 1995, $100 billion; the China earthquake in 

2008, $85 billion. 

Source: The International Disaster Database,
 

Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters
 

Scientists are often overlooked by public offcials and emergency managers. Of 

the primary lessons from Superstorm Sandy, one of the most signifcant was the 

importance of ensuring that understandable, threat-specifc information got to 

the right decision-makers at the right time and at the right place. As an example, 

while the mayor of Hoboken understood that Sandy was a storm surge and not a 

wind event, she had a diffcult time convincing the city’s utility offcials. The head 

of the water department, citing the city’s new water pump system, was convinced 

that the city could handle local fooding. The mayor enlisted the help of ocean 

engineering professors at the Stevens Institute of Technology located in Hoboken. 

Those scientists were able to point out that the town was up against an 8-10 

foot storm surge from the Atlantic Ocean that would submerge virtually the entire 

city. At that point, the city offcials began to appreciate the likely magnitude of 

the storm surge and mobilized emergency workers to go door-to-door to ensure 

the evacuation of basement apartments and businesses, undoubtedly saving a 

number of lives. 

It is important to fnd a way to scale substantive expertise so that all local and 

state offcials have a better appreciation of the kind of hazards they face and 

their likely consequences. To this end, the federal government should invest in 

constructing models and simulation tools than can support visualizing risk and 

provide for “what-if” decision making by practitioners. 

When it comes to transportation infrastructure, strengthening resilience requires a 

multi-hazard, multi-system approach. The transportation system brings together 

many different systems, facilities, owners and operators with different governance 

models, different capabilities and resources, and different incentives for taking 

preventative actions. The tendency is to assess and plan for one hazard and 

one part of the system. Each part of the system has its own vulnerabilities and 

capacities. Loss of capacity in any one part affects the whole system in ways 

that are hazard dependent and diffcult to fully understand. 

The single greatest action that could improve transportation resilience is regional 

transportation planning. To be truly resilient, the transportation system must have 

catastrophe planning that crosses jurisdictional and management silos. Further, 

this regional effort must include detailed analysis and planning that take into 

account the risk of low probability, yet highly consequential events. 

To support transportation catastrophe planning on a regional scale, private 

sector owner/operators and communities across local, county, and even state 

lines should also institute a commitment to routine, joint regional exercises and 

tabletops. Only when exercises and tabletops assemble all the relevant private 

and public players will it be possible for offcials to develop a full understanding 

of the dependencies and interdependencies that are most often the points of 

weakness leading to cascading failures. 

The effects of transportation disruption imposed signifcant economic costs 

on the nation as well as on the region. Because of power losses, fooding and 

damage to facilities and cargo, Superstorm Sandy closed the Port of New York 

and New Jersey for a week. During that closure, container ship operators 

diverted their New York-bound cargo to Baltimore, Halifax and the Port of 

Virginia. These diversions were extremely expensive and the problems were 

compounded by the failure to waive the Jones Act for anything but fuel deliveries. 

The Jones Act requires that any cargo moving between U.S. domestic ports by 

sea be moved on U.S.-fagged vessels. Cargo in the port of Baltimore could be 

moved by rail at some cost. Cargo diverted to the port of Halifax could be moved 

on the next available vessel regardless of country of origin thereby speeding 

up its delivery time once the Port of New York was reopened, and reducing the 

cost of the diversion. Meanwhile, cargo diverted to the Port of Virginia required 

movement by U.S.-fagged vessels (rail lines between that port and New York 

and New Jersey are not suffcient to move large quantities of containers). Since 

there were few such vessels available to move this cargo, the result was to add 

considerable delay to deliveries while signifcantly increasing the cost. This is an 

illustration of not only direct damage to infrastructure, but also how infexible rules 

can end up compounding the costs and slowing post-disaster recovery. 

13 
Northeastern University • Center for Resilience Studies

14

6,500 TEU’s

Diverted to Port of Virginia

Sandy-Related Cargo Diversion

Port of New York

and New Jersey

8,200 TEU’s

Diverted to Port of Halifax

Figure 6. The majority of cargo originally destined for New York was diverted to the 

Ports of Halifax and Virginia. Source: CRS analysis of information provided by the 

ports of New York and New Jersey, Virginia and Halifax. 

Plenary 2: Community Resilience Trends

Background 

Plenary 2 broadened the discussion of resilience beyond Superstorm Sandy into 

the wider discussion of the state of community resilience research and practice in 

the United States today. It attempted to provide an understanding of the larger 

context into which NIST standards for community and infrastructure resilience 

must ft to have practical effects and introduce some of the uncertainties around 

creating incentives for resilience investments. The plenary consisted of opening 

remarks by Warren Edwards and John Plodinec of the Community and Regional 

Resilience Institute followed by a panel discussion. The participating panelists 

were Alice Hill, Senior Advisor for Preparedness and Resilience, National Security 

Staff; David Kaufman, Associate Administrator for Policy, Programs Analysis and 

International Affairs, FEMA; Susan Cutter, Director, Hazards Research Laboratory, 

University of South Carolina; Scott Graham, Mid-Atlantic Division, American Red 

Cross; and Meir Elran, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of National Security 

Studies, Tel Aviv University. 

Framing the Discussion 

Warren Edwards and John Plodinec from the Community and Regional Resilience 

Institute (CARRI) provided initial thoughts on the trends in community resilience in 

the U.S. today. 

Resilience is a term that is widely used by government, academia, public and 

private offcials at all levels. The concept of resilience has grown dramatically over 

the past ten years and is suggested as a way to solve many of the nation’s most 

diffcult challenges. However, there remains considerable confusion on exactly 

how resilience should be understood and applied. Often, different audiences see 

resilience in light of the problems they wish to solve.

There has been signifcant progress in the past decade in increased 

understanding of resilience as it applies to communities as well as to 

infrastructure. Much of that work has been within domains or within 

infrastructures. 

There is a growing recognition of interdependencies between and among 

systems as a challenge in understanding resilience and in creating practical paths 

toward more resilient communities and infrastructures. 

The federal government has adopted the concept and that adoption is refected 

in national level documents. This recognition by the government can be a 

signifcant force in moving the concept forward toward wider adoption. 

However, there remain many tasks to accomplish before resilience achieves its 

potential as a power to transform. 

There is continued fragmentation of effort at all levels. The federal government 

has no formal interagency process to coordinate disparate and often conficting 

resilience programs and projects. There are multiple and frequently overlapping 

efforts to fnd practical ways to advance resilience housed in local governments, 

non-profts and foundations, and in academic institutions. There is no recognized 

research priority agenda to help focus research on knowledge gaps in a way that 

can produce practical, usable tools and processes for building community and 

infrastructure resilience.

Figure 7. (Pictured left to right) Warren Edwards leads a panel discussion on 

community resilience with Alice Hill, David Kaufman, Meir Elran, Susan Cutter, 

Scott Graham, and John Plodinec. Stephen Flynn (standing) contributes to the 

discussion. 

In many cases, the resilience efforts that are the most advanced are producing 

overly complex systems, processes and tools that communities are unable to 

realistically apply on their own. Limited resources in most communities prevent 

the use of complex instruments that require outside experts.

There are few incentives for community and business leaders to take on the 

diffcult task of creating resilient communities or infrastructures. The “business 

case” for resilience has not been stated in a way that compels action. 

Resilience requires action and action requires resources – fnancial and 

human. Communities face competing priorities for their investments and see 

resilience as a long-term, discretionary investment. Despite this, there are some 

investments being made in bolstering resilience. Much of this investment is by 

large businesses that are beginning to understand that resilience reduces their 

vulnerabilities to disaster as well as other signifcant disruptions. There is some 

investment by local government in continuity of service particularly where those 

communities own their own service infrastructures. The Department of Homeland 

Security (DHS) has made signifcant investment in security, some of which creates 

resilience. However, in most communities, small and mid-sized businesses and 

families have made no investments in creating resilience. 
4.0 Plenary Discussions 

15

Panel Discussion Highlights 

In the course of discussion panel members made these signifcant points:

• One of the challenges faced by the federal government is how to make 

resilience resilient. How can it be made a lasting term and a valuable, 

productive concept? 

• Perhaps the most important high-probability, high-consequence challenges 

that must be embraced is the challenge of climate change. This challenge 

needs to be included in the model of resilience with an emphasis on making 

design and development decisions that mitigate the risk associated with 

climate change. In other words, resilience can’t be viewed as simply 

“bouncing back” because the old conditions are not sustainable. Some of the 

changes will be lasting. The challenge is less about response and recovery 

and more about planning for the future. Any standards models developed for 

resilience must accommodate that reality. 

• From a research perspective, resilience, while not new, has become more 

popular as a consequence of disasters, climate change and adoption of the 

term by the federal government. The federal government is leading the charge 

with researchers following behind. Part of the research effort should focus on 

capacity building; fguring out what information is needed in order to design 

more resilient systems. As resilient infrastructure systems should be able to 

adapt to changing conditions, it is important to understand the capabilities of 

these systems, the extent of their ability to adapt and the capacity to monitor 

the adaptive properties. 

• FEMA has been advancing a community-oriented theme. Disasters and 

crises do not happen to government; they happen to communities and to the 

whole society – individuals, families, businesses, schools, etc. Cultural values 

and cultural norms are the social underpinning of our actions as citizens and 

members of society. These cultural values are important in determining how 

a community meets and deals with a crisis. One of the strongest pathways 

to building collective capacities is to build on the existing points of connection 

within a community.

Figure 8. A Napa County Library worker, Chris Geyer, tends to the mess left by the 

magnitude-6.0 earthquake that hit the San Francisco Bay area on August 25, 2014. 

Source: Peter DaSilva, European Pressphoto Agency

• From an international perspective, Israel has a highly resilient population tested 

over many disruptive (largely human induced) events. The people and the 

communities have very high capacities to continue operations and daily life in 

crisis. There are six reasons for this high rate of resilience:

• A high rate of preparedness based on known doctrine and many exercises

• Continuous systems and programs to mitigate the effects of the disruptions

• Awareness and the effective dissemination of information

• Leadership – the constituency must trust local leadership

• The cultural norms of the society

• Organization of the effort

• A theme that runs through the six Israeli points is responsibility - individual, 

family and community responsibility. 

• The Red Cross is looking much more closely at the full disaster cycle rather 

than only at response and immediate recovery. It is pioneering the use of 

apps that can assist in disaster information before, during and after the crisis. 

• Without relationships and trust, resilience doesn’t work at the community level.

• Overcoming any lack of a sense of urgency requires fnding hooks and 

incentive structures that need to be changed or the connection points that 

need to be bridged to impel action. Trust is the centerpiece of this effort.

• There have been signifcant changes to the Stafford Act following Sandy. 

FEMA now has the ability to replace destroyed infrastructure with better 

infrastructure. This takes away some of the disincentive to adaptation. 

However, this does not mean that the right fnancial incentives are in place. 

Insurance is a short-term incentive – rates are based on today’s risk. It is 

necessary to look at long-term mitigation inducements and to understand the 

lending side of incentives – the fnancial inducement to resilience. 

• All communities are different. A one-size-fts-all strategy will not work. Instead 

it is important to look at both top down and bottom up strategies that are 

adaptable to localities.

Plenary 3: Infrastructure Resilience Trends

Background 

Plenary 3 steered the discussion of resilience into the much more specifc 

topic of the built environment and how the concept of resilience was trending 

in that arena. It was intended to explore the current understanding of 

resilience as applied to the nation’s large lifeline infrastructures and provide 

some ideas on how standards might be constructed to better measure and 

advance infrastructure resilience. The panel was also asked to consider the 

interdependencies of a community’s systems and how those interdependencies 

related to overall community capacity to recover following a disaster. The plenary 

was opened with remarks by Stephen Flynn who also moderated the panel 

discussion. Panelists were Michael Bruno, Dean, Schaefer School of Engineering 

and Science, Stevens Institute of Technology; Najib Abboud, Principal and 

CTO, Wiedlinger Associates, Inc.; Jerome Hajjar, Chair, Department of Civil 

and Environmental Engineering, Northeastern University; Jalal Mapar, Director, 

Resilient Systems Division, DHS S&T; Stephen Conrad, Manager, Resilience and 

Regulatory Effects Department, Sandia National Laboratory; and Klaus Thoma, 

Director, Fraunhofer EMI.

Figure 9. (Pictured left to right) Jerome Hajjar, Stephen Conrad, Jalal Mapar, Najib 

Abboud, Michael Bruno and Stephen Flynn participate in the plenary session on 

infrastructure resilience trends.
Northeastern University • Center for Resilience Studies

16

Framing the Discussion 

The major sources of risk to critical infrastructure are:

• More users that push or exceed infrastructure design capacity

• Aging infrastructure without adequate investment in maintenance and repair

• Rising urbanization particularly in coastal areas with substantial exposure to 

the effects of climate change

• External shocks from naturally occurring and man-made sources

• The absence of political will for undertaking the advanced planning and 

long-term investment in building, upgrading, and adequately maintaining 

infrastructure

All of this requires a new emphasis on bolstering critical infrastructure resilience.

There are signifcant challenges to creating critical infrastructure resilience:

• In most large infrastructure networks (e.g., water, power and transportation 

systems) a small minority of nodes or links carries a majority of the fows; i.e., 

they are built to optimize effciency and not resiliency

• At the component level, national and regional design codes for buildings, 

bridges, and infrastructure components rarely address issues of resiliency for 

multiple hazards

• At the system level, inadequate models exist to predict the performance and 

impact of cascading failures on independent regional systems and networks 

to better enable them to withstand and more nimbly recover from major 

disruptive events

• Hazards such as those related to climate change, earthquakes, and terrorism 

have deep uncertainty that must be accounted for in strategies for resilience.

Figure 10. The I-35W Mississippi River Bridge collapsed in 2007 as a result of a 

design flaw. It carried appx. 140,000 vehicles per day. Source: Mike Wills, Flickr

There are several imperatives for advancing critical infrastructure resilience:

• Ensuring fexibility by designing for non-stationarity and accounting for deep 

uncertainty

• Characterizing interdependence by developing large-scale computational 

systems for simulations

• Proactively designing mitigation measures for cascading systematic failure or 

recovery

• Developing methods to characterize metrics for resilience

• Continuous monitoring of human-infrastructure interactions

• Learning from disasters when they occur

All of this leads to the conclusion that there are signifcant opportunities for 

advancing critical infrastructure resilience:

• There is no shortage of disasters to learn from

• Recent research and experience in climate change adaptation planning 

provides valuable approaches for dealing with non-stationarity and deep 

uncertainty

• The new paradigm of performance-based engineering has been evolving to 

enable new building technologies and structural design to better enable more 

reliable prediction and control of the performance of buildings exposed to a 

spectrum of natural or man-made hazards

• There are growing computational capacities to model complex networks 

across natural, engineered and human systems that can support “what-if” 

questions; i.e., developing problem-solving and response strategies that result 

in the best performances in different scenarios

• CyberGIS has emerged as a new-generation of geographic information 

systems comprising a seamless blending of advanced cyber-infrastructure, 

GIS, and spatial analysis and modeling capabilities, leading to widespread 

scientifc advances and broad societal impacts

So, why have there not been signifcant investments in resilience?

• There is a lack of recognition about the current abilities to handle foreseeable 

risks and uncertainties.

• There aren’t incentives to create resilience. 

• Measuring resilience is diffcult because there is not yet a consensus on how 

to create it.

• There are organizational or governance barriers to creating resilience.

Panel Discussion Highlights:

In a wide-ranging discussion, the panel highlighted these points:

• There is a growing body of new and more sophisticated, high resolution 

models to assist researchers and communities in the challenge of assessing 

mitigation needs and efforts. A concern, however, is the unintended 

consequences of mitigation efforts. In general, the engineering community 

doesn’t think a lot about those effects. For example, in Superstorm Sandy 

fooding came close to causing truly catastrophic damage to the rebuilding 

efforts at the World Trade Center. It turned out that this disaster was likely 

averted because the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel flled and absorbed a signifcant 

amount of the fooding that would have otherwise generated additional 

fooding at the World Trade Center construction site. In the future, however, 

there are plans to plug the tunnel so that it will not food. What does that 

mean for other nearby facilities?

• The concept of resilience is rarely being practiced today. Simply doing food 

control does not equal resilience. Too often old practices are being disguised 

and relabeled as resilience. But there are some hopeful signs of change. For 

example, the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey recently completed a 

process that looked at projects planned before Sandy and scored them on a 

resilience scale. 

• DHS S&T attempts to be forward looking and not just focus on past disasters. 

The world is in constant change. On the national side, climate change 

continues to be a signifcant worry and its effects on infrastructure are still not 

fully understood. 

• The United States must look at risk in a different way. It is critical to consider 

and understand multi-dimensional risk. 

• There is more to worry about than physical threats. Cyber threats and 

vulnerabilities are growing signifcant. Also, cascading effects and 

interdependencies affect our understanding of resilience.

• Measuring resilience is a well-recognized and serious challenge. There needs 

to be a commitment to developing appropriate metrics and creating a better 

measuring system. 
4.0 Plenary Discussions 

17

• Performance based standards that focus on functionality should be the focus 

of resilience measurement. Lifeline infrastructures are more than simply 

assets; they are systems. Systems themselves need services and without 

them they fail. All of these systems have multiple stakeholders. Optimal 

resilience answers that work for some stakeholders may not work for others. 

All stakeholders in systems resilience are going to do cost analysis and if there 

isn’t a clear beneft, they will resist participating. 

• There is signifcant room for progress in codes and regulations. Engineers are 

resistant but need to start baking resilience into codes for built infrastructure. 

It is also important to adapt current codes to resilient practices. For example, 

Boston’s building codes require all generators to be in the basement of 

buildings. But placing generators in basements of waterfront buildings that 

are at sea level is not a resilient practice. 

• A lack of communication between state and federal authorities on bridge 

measurement regulations has resulted in instances of incorrect data being 

used to evaluate the nation’s transportation system. Figure 11 on the next 

page shows not only are some of the country’s most heavily traffcked bridges 

rated insuffcient by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), but also, 

as in the case of the recently built St. Anthony Falls Bridge in Minnesota, the 

actual suffciency rating can differ signifcantly between data provided by the 

state departments of transportation and the FHWA. An offcial at MNDOT 

emphasized that the St. Anthony Falls Bridge example is not unique. 

• As the data necessary to conduct modeling and to actually build resilient 

infrastructure is amassed, there is an absolute requirement that it remain safe. 

The threat from malicious hackers is ever present. It will be necessary to 

provide a trusted regime so that data can be shared prior to disasters and to 

support investigations of infrastructure failures after disaster occur. 

• One of the ways to get around the sensitivity of data is to sanitize it and create 

fctitious but realistic modeling data that can be integrated into simulations that 

support decision-making. It should be possible to put that realistic modeling 

data with real engineering systems models and essentially create something 

akin to a sandbox in which data and models can be shared and allow 

facilitated interaction. 

• There is a strong tendency to produce systems and overly complicated 

models that communities cannot use. Modelers and engineers must listen 

to cities and communities to understand their needs and responsibilities – 

meet them where they are and understand what they think their resilience 

challenges are. This builds community trust. The same is true for private 

businesses.

• New models should use existing technologies that people are comfortable 

with like Google Maps. In that way, they can feel comfortable using new tools 

to visualize the impacts of potential disasters in their communities. 

• Very few people actually understand resilience. It is imperative that resilience 

researchers and practitioners work to educate the public. Local communities, 

leaders and individuals need to know what resilience is and how it relates to 

them.

• It is important not to forget the social models as the engineering models 

are developed. Engineers are resistant to including social models because 

they are uncomfortable with the lack of codifcation, standardization and 

quantifcation of those models. It is important to fnd ways around this 

challenge.

• One of the challenges with resilience is that the beneft lies either too far 

in the future or the beneft lies with someone else. This is going to be a 

recurring issue. The analogy may be environmental issues. Sometime around 

the 1970’s the country decided that the environment would be regulated. 

Perhaps resilience needs to ft into the same pattern.

Plenary 4: Creating Incentives for Resilience 

Investments

Background

One of the signifcant challenges discussed in all three of the previous plenary 

sessions was the issue of creating the right incentives for resilience investments. 

Plenary 4 was designed to tackle that topic. To get the panel discussion started, 

moderator Stephen Flynn related the basics of the New York Metropolitan 

Transportation Authority catastrophe bond story as a mini-case study. The panel 

for this session was composed of Eric Letvin, Director, Hazards Mitigation and 

Resilience Policy, National Security Council; Laureen Coyne, Director, Risk and 

Insurance Management, MTA; Roy Wright, Deputy Associate Administrator for 

Mitigation, FEMA; and Debra Ballen, General Counsel, Insurance Institute for 

Business and Home Safety. The panel’s task was to examine potential policy, 

economic and social incentives that could be developed to encourage resilience 

investments in infrastructure, buildings and communities.

Framing the Discussion

The nation faces a counter-productive spiral of ever-growing federal government 

disaster relief and the related moral hazard that fows from it. Twelve of the 

most costly insured catastrophes worldwide between 1970 and 2012 occurred 

since 2000 and most of them were in the U.S. In the same time frame, U.S. 

presidential disaster declarations (allowing the federal government to cover a 

minimum of 75% of the losses) have grown from fewer than 20 annually to close 

to 100 annually in 2013. This trend is likely to be politically unsustainable. 

Making sure that infrastructure owners and operators are properly insured 

is becoming critical. Following Hurricane Katrina, 3 days were required for 

Congress to fund an initial relief package of $10.5 billion followed by an additional 

$51.8 billion one week later; in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, approval 

for disaster aid funding of $50.5 billion took 3 months. Should New York City 

experience a repeat of Sandy in 2015, its request for disaster relief funding would 

likely be highly contentious and approval by Congress would be by no means a 

foregone conclusion.

There is a way forward: Critical infrastructure owner and operators should:

• Assess their risk accurately and determine a portfolio of cost-effective risk 

reduction solutions to support resilience investments

• Recognize behavioral responses to risks; and devise short-term incentives for 

adopting mitigation measures, and long-term risk management.

Insurance markets can be highly effcient and effective providers for cushioning 

the consequences of large losses. The key to this strategy is that insurance 

premiums must be based on risk in order to provide signals to infrastructure 

owners as to the hazards they face and to encourage investment in cost-effective 

adaptation measures to reduce vulnerability to catastrophes through premium 

reductions.

The New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) provides an excellent 

mini-case study. 

• Before Superstorm Sandy, an insurer provided the MTA with $1 billion in 

coverage against damage from foods and other causes. After the storm it was 

not possible to get that kind of coverage. Even half billion dollars would have 

been twice as expensive

• Following the storm, insurers were exhibiting predictable responses in two 

ways:

• They exhibited an availability bias in that they focused on the enormous 

potential claim payments from another Sandy
Northeastern University • Center for Resilience Studies

18

• They demonstrated the effect of imperfect information in that they did not 

adequately consider the likelihood of future hurricanes when determining 

premiums to charge for coverage and how much those at risk would be 

willing to pay for protection

• The MTA decided to issue a Catastrophe Bond (Cat Bond) for $200 million for 

three years at $9.1 million a year. (The implied annual probability of damage 

of $200M or less is 9.1/200 or 0.45. The estimated annual probability of 

damage of $200M or less is .017.) 

• The MTA prioritized their efforts around fooding associated with storm surge. 

They developed models with Risk Management Solutions (RMS) to structure a 

parametric cat bond and requested bids that covered losses should there be 

fooding above 8 1⁄2 feet at Battery Park and 15 1⁄2 feet in Long Island Sound.

• The private market responded positively at a price that the MTA could afford.

There is a role for both insurance and the federal government in creating 

economic and policy incentives for infrastructure resilience investments. 

Insurance guarantees claims payments with little delay and provides an incentive 

to upgrade facilities in advance of the next disaster through the promise of lower 

premiums after validation by independent inspections to ensure that upgrades 

have been accomplished. The federal government ensures accurate maps with 

respect to damage from future fooding. It also provides communities with low 

interest loans and tax incentives for reinforcing mitigation measures and provides 

well-enforced regulations and standards for infrastructure.

Storrow Drive Boston, MA

Age

63 Years

57,700

0.1%

Ambassador Bridge

Detroit» Windsor

Age

85 Years

68,000

Not Rated**

I-35 W St. Anthony Falls Bridge

Minneapolis, MN

Age

6 Years

70,000

27.7% - 84.0%*

George Washington Bridge NY»NJ

Age

83 Years (52 since reconstruction)

285,000

48.22%

Calcasieu River Bridge

Lake Charles, LA

Age

62 Years

63,000

10.91%

I-25 over S. Platte River

Denver, CO

Age

63 Years (44 since reconstruction)

203,000

24.5%

I-10 at I-110 Ave Los Angeles, CA

Age

55 Years

287,000

60.02%

Golden Gate Bridge

San Francisco, CA

Age

77 Years

110,000

59.92%

Sunshine Skyway Bridge

St. Petersburg, FL

Age

28 Years

50,500

69.2%

Interstate Bridge (NB/SB)

Vancouver, WA

Age

57/56 Years

64,286/62,620

18.32%/49.42%

80-100%

60-80%

40-60%

20-40%

Figure 11. A look at some of the country’s most heavily trafficked bridges. Source: CRS analysis of FHWA and MNDOT data. * The FHWA gives this bridge a 0-20%

sufficiency rating of 27.7% while MNDOT gives it an 84.0%. ** The FHWA has no legal authority to require private bridge owners to inspect and maintain their 

bridges. 
4.0 Plenary Discussions 

19

Linear Trend Line

Figure 12. The frequency of expensive disasters has been increasing at a steady rate 

over the past 30 years. Source: CRS analysis of NOAA Billion-Dollar U.S. Weather/

Climate Disasters 1980-2013

Panel Discussion Highlights

The panel discussion elicited these highlights:

• Prior to Sandy, the MTA had procured as much insurance as was available. 

Sandy’s losses at the MTA were close to $5 billion, which was greatly in 

excess of the insurance coverage. The MTA immediately realized that the 

insurance market would contract because of the over exposure of investors in 

the New York area. The MTA has a long history of issuing and administrating 

fnance bonds and has an entire department devoted to these activities. That 

allowed them to consider catastrophe bonds with some confdence and 

knowledge. Catastrophe bonds are relatively new fnancial instruments that 

are not provided by traditional insurance companies. The MTA decided to 

approach investment bankers rather than insurance companies and began 

conversations with Goldman Sachs. In determining what type of bond to 

issue, the MTA examined all perils and then focused on storm surge as the 

one that was most likely to affect them in a catastrophic way. Critical to 

the entire process was a clear evaluation of risk and the ability to measure 

effects accurately. The probability of a storm surge event that would trigger 

payment (based on the events described above) through this parametric 

bond instrument was evaluated at 1.67. Investors confrmed that probability. 

The fnal bond was for $200 million with an annual interest rate 4.5% above 

Treasury bills.

Figure 13. A portion of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s NYC Subway 

Map. Source: Metropolitan Transportation Authority

• In a disaster, federal government funding through FEMA is primarily 

allocated to public infrastructure. One of the biggest challenges is that 

the government’s (public’s) exposure tends to be unknown in advance. 

Primarily this is because there is very little knowledge about the valuation 

of public infrastructures and there is even less transparency. In the case of 

the MTA, there was a very good understanding of the value of assets. That 

is not generally the case across the U.S. where there is little incentive for 

transparency. Transparency should breed self-correcting behavior but the 

federal system is not designed to incentivize that; it is designed to support 

the idea that someone will come in after a disaster and cover the costs. The 

nation has created a system that says if you are a public entity it is better not 

to know what your risk is. You can keep your risk behind the curtain because 

someone else (the federal government) will pay. Even in the case of the MTA, 

it understands that if after all of its insurance and catastrophe bonds there are 

still risks that remain uncovered, it is highly likely that the federal government 

will step in and pay the uncovered costs.

$0 $50 $100 $150 $200

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

1989

1988

1987

1986

1985

1984

1983

1982

1981

1980

Billions of 2013 USD

The Cost of Natural Disasters in US per Year

(Only including disasters ≥ $1bn)

Drought/Heatwave ($39 Billion)

Hurricane Andrew ($45 Billion)

Flooding ($34 Billion)

Hurrican Katrina ($149 Billion)

Hurrican Ike ($32 Billion)

Storm Key

Drought/Heatwave ($30 Billion)

Hurricane Sandy ($66 Billion)

Other Natural Disasters

Figure 14. When adding disasters > $1bn, the five most expensive years have occurred 

in the past decade. Source: CRS analysis of NOAA Billion-Dollar U.S. Weather/

Climate Disasters 1980-2013

• The Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS) is a non-proft 

supported by the insurance and reinsurance industries. It works to assist in 

developing and promulgating mitigation measures. The IBHS facility in South 

Carolina can replicate disasters – hurricanes, wild fres, etc. The IBHS board 

of directors is interested in understanding how to advance resilience. IBHS 

came up with a 3-phased plan: 1) get people aware; 2) get people educated 

on how to build better; and 3) change behavior. The U.S. needs to fgure out 

what incentives can help change behavior. The government uses more carrot 

than stick incentives. The states never get less money during a disaster and 

that causes trouble over the long-term. It is important to determine what 
Northeastern University • Center for Resilience Studies

20

incentives the fnancial (banking) sector can bring to the table. Large retailers 

like Home Depot have a role. There is a political dimension to providing 

appropriate incentives and partisanship gets in the way of resilient activities. 

There is behavior at all levels that has to change for the nation to recognize 

risk and develop a resilient mindset.

• The federal government is actively looking for ways to reward good behavior. 

Resilience has been made a key theme in notices of funding availability 

post-Sandy. This has been done in the Department of Housing and Urban 

Development (HUD) Rebuild by Design program and the Sandy rebuild 

strategy. The federal government has a lot of climate data available including 

a sea level rise data tool kit that is about to be released. The government is 

working to make much more data available to planners and local offcials. It 

is working on a federal food risk reduction standard that should be ready 

soon. Government agencies are also working on a resilience standard for all 

federal actions and grants, not just federal buildings. They are investigating 

how the government can reward specifc behavior tied to performance-based 

standards. There is now an updated climate assessment report available. 

• As important as data are, there is a point where data meets hearts and minds. 

There is an extremely effective way to galvanize a community towards paying 

attention to their risk. FEMA could introduce a new food map that shows 

an expansion to a community’s risk that would “wake up the dead.” But that 

is the point where science meets reality because as much as everyone likes 

resilience, they don’t like to be told that they are risk prone. The U.S. needs 

to be investing more in handling this behavior challenge because the area of 

food risk particularly is where the federal government is producing something 

valuable and the market can decide how it values it one way or another. Hard 

sciences can put together a map and statistical probabilities but it is important 

not to get confused and think that perfect data can change behavior.

• The U.S. has traditionally relied on lots of carrots but fewer sticks. In order to 

build, developers have to propose a plan for someone (zoning offcials, siting 

commissions, etc.) to approve and oversee. Decisions are made in code and 

zoning agencies that could withhold approval to incentivize good behavior. It 

is not clear that many are capitalizing on those opportunities. This leads to 

questions about whether the federal government should impose standards 

and codes and withhold the use of federal money when states will not enact 

or enforce stronger codes and land use policy.

• Most participants seemed to feel that the nation is most likely to get legislative 

reform – to the Stafford Act for instance – on the backside of the next disaster. 

New legislation could require, as a condition to access disaster funding, 

that states and localities: 1) conduct a complete inventory of publicly-owned 

assets; 2) enforce standard model codes; and 3) obtain insurance for a 

portion of value of these assets that would not be covered by federal disaster 

assistance. One suggestion was that Stafford Act relief be converted from 

a federal grant to a loan that would need to be repaid by communities. 

This would provide a motivation for communities to resist making risky 

development decisions and to invest more in mitigation measures to reduce 

their exposure to disaster losses. 

5.0 Breakout Discussions

With the plenary discussions as a refective and thought-provoking backdrop, 

breakout sessions were designed to engage participants in distilling the most 

important issues that should be considered in developing resilience standards 

and in supporting incentives that would stimulate their adoption and use by 

local communities. Two series of work group sessions were devised to respond 

to the plenary ideas and the central questions posed by the Symposium. The 

frst series of work group sessions focused around the creation of standards 

for community and infrastructure resilience. The second series of workshops 

addressed the importance of policy and fnancial incentives, as well as 

international perspectives on standards and incentives. Discussions below 

summarize the results from these work group deliberations. 

Day 1, Work Groups A & D, Creating 

Infrastructure Resilience Standards

Given the level of interest on the part of Symposium sponsors and participants in 

establishing resilience standards for the built infrastructures of communities, two 

breakout groups concurrently tackled these issues. All together more than 50 

participants and 8 discussants shared their ideas regarding the important issues 

for establishing infrastructure resilience standards. 

Figure 15. Researchers at Northeastern University’s STReSS Lab test structures and 

their components for resilience against natural and man-made disruptions. Source: 

George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security.

Key Discussion Points

Highlighted below are the important points from the work groups’ discussion.

Develop Functionally-based Performance Goals 

Participants in both work groups were strongly emphatic that any infrastructure 

standards developed would have to be “outcome driven” – supporting NIST’s 

intention that standards should be based on the performance goals that support 

the continuity of the critical functions communities depend on for their safety 

and well-being. For example, infrastructure standards must help communities 

create infrastructure systems that support rapid return of the regional workforce 

but whose design and implementation do not drive owner/operators and local 

industry “out of business” in trying to afford the costs. Rather than being 

prescriptive, infrastructure standards should focus on desired outcomes within 

specifed recovery time frames. Participants also noted, however, that once 

communities have established their performance goals, some minimal levels 

of functionality could and should be built into local building codes and other 

more “directive” mechanisms to ensure minimum thresholds of functionality are 

implemented within the community. 

Address the Human Element in Standards and 

Performance Goals 

Further, participants argued that even standards for built infrastructure must 

take into account the “human element,” to include not just the community’s 

desired performance outcome, but also how these goals will intersect with 

human behavior within different elements of the community. One participant 

noted that within their region’s major port there were both national security and 

private business activities. These two elements had vastly different performance 

expectations for the port infrastructures; standards would have to be fexible 

enough to meet both sets of considerations without putting private industry in the 

port area at a competitive disadvantage. Because resilience is a complex quality 

that depends upon tangible elements (building codes, for example) and intangible 

elements (human behaviors, community culture, needs of the individual versus 

larger public good etc.), participants worried that the standards development 

effort would end up too narrowly focusing on only easily measurable aspects.
5.0 Breakout Discussions

21

Accommodate the Impacts of Regionalism 

Lastly, both groups were in frm agreement that infrastructure standards, while 

locally implemented, would have to recognize the impact of the wider region and 

the complexity that harmonizing approaches across multiple political jurisdictions 

bring to improving infrastructure resilience. Particularly in dense metropolitan 

regional environments, infrastructures for transit and power invariably cross many 

city, county, and state jurisdictions, yet standards would have to be implemented 

jurisdiction by jurisdiction. 

Recommended Actions

Both work groups acknowledged that at the federal level, NIST personnel bring 

outstanding expertise to the process of building specifc performance standards 

for built infrastructure elements (codes for building materials, performance 

requirements for components of transit systems, etc.). Therefore many 

recommendations were focused around steps that might make standards more 

understandable and acceptable to communities and residents. Key elements of 

recommended actions:

• Help educate communities on the need for resilience standards.

• Create community case studies that illustrate key concepts of resilience 

standards within regions to include meeting community-based 

performance standards, pay off on investment for improved resilience, etc.

• Engage stakeholders in testing and providing feedback on specifc 

elements for standards, particularly on their view of the payback for any 

given investment.

• Provide stakeholders with tools that help them to visualize tradeoffs, conduct 

“what-if” scenarios, and understand the consequences of more or less 

improved infrastructure resilience.

• Ensure that standards are developed to consider varying sizes and types of 

communities. Setting standards that work only for a large urban megalopolis 

may not be helpful for small and medium size communities who lack both the 

complexity and the resources of the large urban centers.

Day 1, Work Group B, Creating Community 

Resilience Standards

This work group examined issues surrounding standards for community 

resilience, a label fraught with ambiguity and layers of meaning. Discussions 

in this group examined whether “standards” could be set for community-level 

characteristics. If so, could these characteristics account for the less “tangible” 

elements of community resilience? And if established, what are the essential 

elements that must be included in those standards?

Key Discussion Points

Issues of Variability and Complexity may Impede 

Successful Standards 

This work group’s discussion began with exploration of a key question: Could 

standards be developed and effectively implemented for community resilience? 

Both U.S. and international participants alike observed that variability of 

communities in size, scale, demography, cultural norms, income, risks, threats, 

etc. would make truly measurable standards diffcult. When the variability of 

communities is coupled with the complexity of resilience as an attribute or 

outcome, most participants were doubtful that effective standards could be 

universally implemented. Instead, participants were more confdent that standards 

could be developed for components of community resilience. The suggestion 

of one participant that NIST’s efforts should be more accurately titled, Physical 

Environment Standards for Resilience of American Communities, was met by 

broad approbation. 

Successful Standards must Address Intangible Qualities

Group members were also vociferous in their views that community resilience 

involves intangible elements that do not readily lend themselves to quantitative 

measurement. For most participants, the notion of “standards” implies an ability 

to quantify and measure, and most speakers doubted that community resilience 

would lend itself to quantifable measurement. Group members strongly urged 

NIST to recognize that quality of community resilience as measured by positive 

outcomes in the aftermath of disruptive events is their ultimate product. 

Community Resilience is a Process 

Most importantly, participants urged that community resilience is not just a 

compilation of discreet standards but is a process. As one member noted, “How 

you get there, determines where you actually get to.” 

Necessary Elements of Community Resilience Standards

If community resilience standards are possible, participants expressed that they 

must address outcomes and expectations of what the standard is designed to 

achieve for the community. NIST’s approach should recognize that successful 

community resilience standards must include: 

1. “Top down” elements of expectation and include measurable component 

standards (such as those which might be set for buildings and lifeline 

infrastructures), and

2. “Bottom up” community processes that identify local performance goals and 

behavior standards.

Recommended Actions

As key observations were digested, participants identifed two areas of 

recommended action. First, NIST should explicitly recognize a community-based 

process in establishing standards. The process should include engagement of the 

community in goal setting, understanding risks, and making informed decisions. 

This approach would incorporate shared responsibility for building resilience and 

also allow for different risk tolerances and norms across communities. Further, 

this approach would help to educate community members regarding resilience 

and the choices to be made that might strengthen it in their community. The 

approach should consider K-12 education as part of the process, so that over 

time the nation grows residents who have developed a resilient “frame of mind” – 

another important, but intangible, aspect of resilience in communities.

Second, participants urged NIST to consider setting principles or performance 

goals that might be used by communities to guide the establishment of local 

standards and requirements. Such performance goals should include behavioral 

goals or objectives – helping to address the more “intangible” aspects of 

resilience. Establishment of performance goals or principles should also include 

development of exemplars that model resilient behaviors for all sectors and 

elements of the community.

With these actions, work group members felt that NIST’s development efforts 

could produce processes and goals that would be helpful to communities in 

improving their resilience.

Day 1, Work Group C, Establishing and 

Adopting Resilience Standards

While the frst three work groups examined issues surrounding the notions of 

infrastructure and community resilience standards, Work Group C was designed 

to examine what might be required to actually develop standards which would 

be widely acceptable and effectively implementable. Members of this work 

group were asked to explore how NIST might advance a collaborative process 

among the multiple standards-setting entities that could play a supportive role in 

developing resilience standards.
Northeastern University • Center for Resilience Studies

22

Key Discussion Points

Build a Process that Helps Define Important Indicators 

of Resilience 

Participants in this work group were united in their observations that NIST’s 

efforts should be focused around defning indicators of increased resilience rather 

than coming up with new, technically-oriented, prescriptive resilience standards. 

Most participants voiced concerns that much effort would be spent on 

developing new resilience standards, rather than understanding how standards 

for technical performance of community resilience components, indicators of 

human/social aspects of resilience, and levels of desired functionality could be 

combined to provide communities with meaningful indicators against which they 

might assess their state of resilience. 

Use a Development Process that Yields Communitybased Performance Goals 

Participants strongly supported the notion that defning the critical functions that 

communities depend on for their safety and well-being and how the continuity 

of those functions can be better assured is critical to the development of usable 

and non-ambiguous standards. As with other groups, these participants also felt 

that the development process should be constructed to yield community-based 

performance goals and objectives, rather than a scientifcally-oriented process 

that produces prescriptive, technical standards. Further, participants felt the 

development process should be conducted in a way that its products would be 

scalable and able to meet the variability of community type and circumstance. 

Build a Broadly Representative and Inclusive 

Development Process 

Finally, participants observed that the process should include broadly defned 

stakeholders that included representatives from the “full fabric” of community 

resilience. Only with an inclusive process that resulted in broadly applicable, 

scalable functional goals would NIST’s process yield an end product that answers 

the question, “so what?”

Recommended Actions

Work Group C offered two sets of recommended steps. First, the development 

process should remain collaborative, evolving and refexive. Further, NIST should 

be deliberate in including a wide range of community resilience stakeholders 

– from emergency responders to ecologists, to urban planners, to economic 

developers – all must have a place in the process if performance goals or 

standards are to be accepted and acceptable. Additionally, group members 

urged the process designers to especially emphasize the involvement of the 

younger generations (millennials and Gen X’ers) both to build resilience thinking 

and mindsets and to ensure future continuity of resilience building efforts.

Second, work group members urged that whatever products resulted from the 

development efforts should be “vetted” for conficts with existing codes and 

standards, reducing implementation conficts and strengthening the impact of the 

products. In addition, the products should be robustly “road tested” to evaluate 

effectiveness and utility – before they are mandated for communities nationwide.

Day 2, Work Groups A & D, International 

Perspectives on Resilience Incentives and Global 

Issues

Work Groups A and D again addressed the same topic to make best use of the 

many international participants attending the symposium. These two groups 

were asked to share ideas on the use of policy, economic, and social incentives 

in the international arena to encourage resilient investments. While NIST’s 

development process will yield products for application in U.S. communities, 

representatives from thirteen foreign countries were asked to share their 

perspectives and experiences with incentive approaches that have stimulated 

efforts to enhance resilience.

Key Discussion Points

This discussion focused on challenges to establishing incentives, issues to be 

considered, and the variety of incentivizing mechanisms that can be used to 

stimulate resilient outcomes. Highlights of the discussion are presented below.

Shared Global Challenges to Resilience Incentives

Participants across both groups recognized shared transnational challenges to 

the crafting and use of effective incentives for resilience. Multiple participants 

from several countries and cultures noted similar challenges with efforts 

to strengthen not just the resilience of the built environment, but also the 

resilience of social capital and the capacity of civil society to thrive in the face 

of disturbance. Further, numerous speakers noted that there was a global 

trend and interest in progressing from postures of protection and security to 

more forward-leaning resilience attitudes; however, speakers also noted that 

moving their countrymen from simple risk management behaviors and strategies 

to resilience-building actions is still a diffcult transition to make. Additionally, 

regardless of country of origin, group members noted there were signifcant 

disincentives to resilient behaviors – sometimes legislative or legal barriers, 

sometimes management structures or approaches, and sometimes behavioral 

habits or norms.

Considerations for Effective Incentives 

In order to incentivize resilient behaviors and actions, participants identifed 

several considerations that would have to be incorporated. First, incentives 

will only work if stakeholders have reached consensus on the quality being 

measured, how it is being measured, and if there is demonstrable linkage to the 

resilience outcome. Second, the incentive must be relevant to the stakeholders 

and the desired resilience outcome. Third, the incentives must be culturally 

appropriate and applicable in addressing regional resilience issues. 

 

Use a Range of Incentive Types to Stimulate Desired 

Resilience Actions 

Finally, members from both work groups noted that there are many different 

forms of incentives; those desiring to stimulate resilient behaviors or outcomes 

should consider different models and types of incentives that could be useful 

in achieving the desired effect. Participants noted that some incentives are 

cooperative, that is, the incentive recognizes voluntary achievement of some state 

of enhanced resilience with fnancial or other tangible reward. These incentives 

are typically the “carrot” that elicits positive response in order to gain the reward. 

Several participants, however, noted that in some circumstances or cultural 

norms, incentives might be more regulatory; in these cases, the incentive is the 

“stick” that causes the desired behavior in order to avoid the consequences of 

inaction or improper action. In addition to these more conventional concepts 

of incentives, several speakers noted that in some instances, the presence of 

motivators may best act as stimulators of desired actions or outcomes. Most 

familiar of these types of incentivizers are “salient” events – that is the community 

actually has experienced or periodically experiences adverse consequences 

from some disruption (hurricanes, foods, earthquakes, etc.). In other instances, 

third-party resilience facilitators may help communities take steps to enhance 

their resilience. The engagement of non-state actors such as NGO’s, private 

corporations, resilience researchers and practitioners can play important 

roles in spurring communities to adopt resilience performance goals and seek 

strengthened resilience. In this same regard, reputation, competitive advantage, 

and peer effects can also be powerful motivators that encourage communities to 

adopt resilient practices and standards. 

Recommended Actions

With these observations in hand, participants from the two groups identifed 

three areas of action. First, from an international policy standpoint, participants 

suggested engagement in processes around the Hyogo Framework as a means 

of increasing attention to resilience around the globe. With the framework’s 

timetable coming to an end in 2015, there will be opportunities to infuence what 

the post-2015 guidance will look like and to encourage broad, international 
5.0 Breakout Discussions

23

adoption of the resilience principles embodied in the Hyogo Framework.

Second, numerous speakers supported actions that would strengthen 

international collaboration among researchers. Most notably, group members 

suggested the establishment of both theoretical frameworks that could serve 

as a common language and technical infrastructures that would overcome 

barriers to transnational data to enable greater information, data, and lesson 

sharing. Establishment of such a global resilience network would empower 

resilience champions, support the study and transnational application of resilience 

innovations, and help overcome barriers for shared funding opportunities to fow 

across borders.

Figure 16. Following the Symposium, this group of international and domestic 

participants discussed the formation of a global resilience network

Third, participants recommended that leaders and champions of resilience 

capitalize on corporate interests of large multinational and global corporations. 

For these corporations, their global supply chain can be a source of vulnerability 

or a hallmark of their resilience building. Thus, these private businesses 

increasingly recognize a corporate social responsibility that can protect their 

“bottom line” and at the same time spur their willingness to lead resilience 

strengthening actions, provide expertise on resilience building or provide funding 

for resilience activities. 

Day 2, Work Group B, Creating Policy 

Incentives for Resilience Investments

This group of participants was asked to consider how policy incentives could 

stimulate adoption of standards and consequent investment in resilience building 

actions. Ultimately, insight from their deliberations would help NIST and other 

agencies craft or recommend policy incentives that could encourage resilient 

investment in U.S. communities.

Key Discussion Points

Echoing a fow of ideas that had circulated throughout the Symposium, speakers 

in this discussion affrmed the connection between the use of incentives and the 

adoption of resilience standards or resilience improving behaviors. From this 

foundational belief, the majority of the group’s discussions focused on necessary 

and effective roles that policy and policy makers could play in the creation of 

resilience incentives, illuminating three important roles:

Educate about resilience and risk management

First, policy must stimulate education and understanding of important concepts, 

a grasp of which is necessary for resilience improvement. Policy must be 

constructed in ways that assist people in understanding the risks they face 

and their options for managing that risk – accepting the risk and living with the 

consequences, transferring it through insurance, or buying it down through 

investment in pre-emptive, preventive, or mitigating actions. 

Clarify desired resilience outcomes that balance “public 

good” risk management with local risk tolerance

Second, policy should help communities clarify the desired outcomes and 

behaviors that constitute resilience (setting standards or acceptable performance 

goals are examples of this role of policy). As part of clarifying these desired 

resilience outcomes, effective policy should also help communities defne and 

understand their risk tolerance – how much risk they are willing to accept and the 

consequences and tradeoffs that accompany that level of risk. Third, effective 

policy should induce desired behaviors or penalize unacceptable behaviors by 

devising a combination of mechanisms that produce desired resilience actions. 

These mechanisms may involve use of taxing strategies, grants, cost shares, or 

other fnancial mechanisms. 

Stimulate pre-emptive resilience actions 

Finally, policy should encourage communities to take these pre-emptive, 

preventive, or mitigating actions well before disruption teaches more cruelly the 

wisdom of early investment (or as speakers in the Symposium phrased it, “Take 

action to the left of BOOM!”). Further, when effectively constructed, policy can 

stimulate investment in design and innovation that builds inherent strength and 

“bakes resilience in.” 

Recommended Actions

This work group outlined 5 specifc actions that NIST and other agencies should 

take in designing policy that would incentivize adoption of resilience standards 

and investments in resilience-strengthening activities. First, policy makers 

should articulate the resilience behaviors that are the desired outcomes for 

communities. Second, policy makers should build an advocating constituency 

that engages all levels of decision makers, including state legislatures and the 

U.S. Congress. Third, policy should be constructed to drive disclosure of data 

regarding communities’ choices and consequences – bringing transparency 

and understanding to the choices and consequences made by communities, 

which are increasingly felt by the nation at large. As one participant noted, 

“transparency drives self-correcting behavior.”

Fourth, policy makers should explore and embrace the full range of mechanisms 

available to them in incentivizing resilience investments. Effective policy 

incentives will include grants, tax incentives, regulatory fexibility, and liability 

protection. Further, as a number of participants noted, setting internal resilience 

policies for their own buying power will have broad impacts on the private 

marketplace. Federal, state, and local governments have tremendous buying 

power just to meet their own operational needs – setting policies that support 

resilience strategies through their own buying power will drive change through 

their supply chains and vendors – ultimately exerting infuence on the broader 

private markets.

Finally, policy makers must ensure that for those taking resilience actions, the 

investments must be revenue positive. To do that, policy makers must work 

closely with the private sector to develop the business case for resilience, 

demonstrating a value proposition that will entice public and private actors to 

adopt standards and implement strengthening actions.

Day 2, Work Group C, Creating Economic 

Incentives for Resilience Investment

Participants in this work group explored issues regarding economic incentives for 

resilience investment. While both government and the private sector can supply 

economic incentives, the initial conceptualization of the session was to explore 

incentives from the marketplace. Numerous speakers, however, noted that policy 

and marketplace incentives are hard to disentangle and function most effectively 

when both sides of the equation are pursuing the same end.
Northeastern University • Center for Resilience Studies

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Key Discussion Points

Government and marketplace work together to create 

effective economic incentives 

Much of this group’s discussion explored the difference in roles between policy 

and marketplace incentives. Participants strongly supported the complementary 

roles of each and noted that marketplace incentives must often follow policy 

leads. Government often becomes the enabler of business incentives, stimulating 

public-private partnerships that increase resilience and the value proposition for 

both sides. This complementary behavior becomes a mechanism for enabling 

lower lending rates for the long-term investments required to really achieve 

heightened resilience and recovery capacities. 

Recommended Actions

Participants recommended two areas of action to support development and 

implementation of economic incentives. First, discussants urged resilience 

champions and leaders to work together to create a national message on the 

value proposition of resilience investment in general. The message would help 

to enlist marketplace players in thinking about economic incentives that can 

stimulate broad adoption of community and infrastructure resilience standards 

and encourage communities to begin taking action. Key to this messaging 

campaign would be a deliberate focus on the younger generation, emphasizing 

the education and engagement of millennials.

Second, these participants recommended that efforts be made to identify early 

adopters from the corporate world to partner with in the creation of effective 

incentives. These organizations would be entities that recognize their risks, the 

threats to their communities, and the costly interplay between the two when 

a community is hit by a natural disaster or other disturbance. Because these 

corporations have “skin in the game,” their own resources to invest and protect, 

and the ability to act quickly, identifcation of and partnering with these early 

adopters could help “jump start” the use and impacts of economic incentives. 

Once there are potent examples of incentives and the resulting positive changes 

in resilience behaviors, other communities and organizations will be encouraged 

to follow suit.

6.0 Participant White Papers

In addition to input through plenary discussions and work group deliberations, 

six participants were asked to provide refections on standards and incentives, 

drawing from their experience and the discussions of the Symposium. These 

papers provide a range of viewpoints on the challenges of establishing 

community resilience standards, the roles that standards can play in increasing 

resilience to natural disasters, and issues that must be considered in establishing 

effective standards. These white papers can be found in Appendix C. 

7.0 Important Themes that Inform NIST’s 

Disaster Resilience Framework

Across the plenary sessions, work group discussions, and participant white 

papers, four major themes emerged from the symposium with signifcant 

implications for the NIST Disaster Resilience Framework.

Figure 17. Stephen Cauffman, NIST Lead for Disaster Resilience, offers concluding 

remarks as Day 2 of the Symposium comes to an end.

Theme 1 - Standard development needs to focus on 

community functionality and the creation of performance–

based standards that support the resilience of that 

functionality.

Infrastructure exists to meet functional needs; it does not exist in a vacuum. 

Understanding that the importance of assuring the continuity of critical functions 

is critical to developing usable and broadly applicable standards. In the end, 

each standard must answer the question, “so what?” Standards that focus 

on desired outcomes will be much more effective than overly prescriptive, 

component-focused formulations. 

Numerous speakers, presenters, and writers noted that prioritizing functional 

needs will vary from community to community based on the community’s 

sense of what is most essential and critical. In general, participants noted that 

community members are concerned about continuity of service or function, rather 

than the inherent robustness or resilience of components and assets. As one 

participant noted, communities will denote infrastructure services as essential 

based on the community’s intolerance for loss of the service. Community 

perception of essentiality and tolerance for disruption become the de facto 

performance requirements. Thus, NIST should recognize the variability likely to 

be present in communities’ perceptions of functionality and their corresponding 

range of expectation regarding the adequacy of standards. Participants also 

strongly agreed that successfully standards or performance goals must address 

three critical issues. 

 (1) Infrastructure resilience to particular risks and threats is related to overall 

infrastructure health – a condition that is sometimes diffcult to assess and 

measure, but which is widely regarded as fragile as the national inventory of 

infrastructure continues to age. Effective standards will have to address this 

differential “starting point” (that is, the differing health status of particular systems) 

when trying to apply standards across systems, jurisdictions, geographies, 

community types, etc., for each of these variables affects the “health” of the 

infrastructure system. 

(2) The resilience of specifc infrastructures is powerfully linked to interconnections 

between and among infrastructures, places, and systems; between different 

networks of infrastructures, such as energy, communication, and transportation; 

and across metropolitan areas and the regions around them. Thus, despite the 

prevalence of fragmented ownership and responsibilities, infrastructure in most 

communities is actually a complex regional web whose resilience is in many ways 

the sum of its parts, making the application of absolute standards for any one 

infrastructure or community diffcult.
7.0 Important Themes that Inform NIST's Disaster Resilience Framework

25

(3) Meaningful measures of and standards for infrastructure resilience will likely 

involve the use of several “types” of metrics. One discussant suggested that NIST 

consider a range of metric “types” similar to those used in the National Academy 

of Sciences/National Research Council, Climate Change Science Program 

(Thinking Strategically, 2005): 

• Process metrics (measuring a course of action);

• Input metrics (measuring tangible quantities inserted in a process to achieve 

a goal); 

• Output metrics (measuring products or services delivered); 

• Outcome metrics (measuring results); and

• Impact metrics (measuring longer-term consequences). 

Figure 18. Construction engineers analyze damage from a tornado in Tuscaloosa, AL. 

Source: Jeff Hanson, University of Alabama

Of particular signifcance for the NIST process, attendees counseled that if 

resilience metrics were to be most meaningful they would have to be developed 

through “bottom-up” processes involving community and infrastructure 

stakeholders whose wide-ranging goals and perspectives could result in metrics 

that are diffcult to compare between communities and infrastructures.

Theme 2 - Standards for built infrastructure demand a 

larger social context within which the built infrastructure 

operates.

There was strong consensus that engineering standards for built infrastructure 

were insuffcient to support a resilience standards regime for the nation.

Symposium attendees were unanimous in agreeing that community and 

infrastructure resilience standards must refect the social, intangible nature of 

resilience. One participant aptly observed: “...to community leaders, resilience 

is a social process, not a set of physical conditions. It is rooted in capabilities in 

a community to come together in a time of crisis and transcend typical barriers 

between public and private sector, city-wide structures and neighbourhoods, rich 

and poor.” 

There was also widespread support for more explicit recognition of the social 

nature of resilience than is currently refected in the Disaster Framework.5 

Some suggested designation of specifc “social infrastructures,” which might 

also have performance goals or standards established for them. Multiple 

speakers indicated that such an approach would help communities to cultivate 

these important capacities – as well as pursuing robust and redundant built 

infrastructure systems. One discussant refected that explicit treatment of 

social infrastructures could encourage communities to nurture and strengthen 

5 The NIST Disaster Resilience Framework Document can be found at http://www.nist.gov/el/building_

materials/resilience/framework.cfm

“adaptive and emergent qualities”– capacities that are generally expressed 

through a community’s social functions (as opposed to built infrastructures which 

may express resilience through bouncing back to a previous state as a result of 

robustness, redundancy, etc.). 

Others refected, however, that even built infrastructure resilience is mediated 

by social inputs (that is, built systems have human operators, human users, 

functional operational protocols, etc. that affect the resilience of the physical 

system). Hence, even standards for built infrastructure must somehow refect the 

social aspect, explicitly including both “structural and non-structural aspects” and 

the interdependencies of physical systems with social capacities. 

Theme 3 - Performance-based community standards 

should acknowledge the regional context within which they 

operate.

One of the strongest themes throughout the Symposium was the universal 

recognition of the interconnectedness of lifeline infrastructures and social 

structures that almost always operate on a regional scale. Transportation, energy, 

communications and water and other critical infrastructures operate across 

multiple jurisdictions; infrastructure sectors are inherently interdependent, and 

regional infrastructure sectors are vulnerable to multiple hazards. Yet in spite 

of these facts, governance, resources and decision-making in the United States 

are organized around state and local jurisdictions and specifc sectors. The 

discussions in plenary, in breakout sessions, and in participant white papers 

gave ample evidence that resilience standards must be developed on a basis 

that acknowledges this regional interconnectedness and that causes and 

accommodates transparent information sharing across infrastructure sectors. 

To community leaders, resilience is a social process, not a 

set of physical conditions.

Creating standards on a regional basis is not without its challenges, however. 

Participants noted several diffculties in addressing “regionalism” in resilience 

standards. First, most attempts at metrics or at accumulating data to support 

resilience metrics have been on a jurisdictional basis – cities, counties, states 

metropolitan statistical areas, etc. A few (such as the Community and Regional 

Resilience Institute’s Community Resilience System) have used regionally based 

assessment processes to help communities identify and evaluate its critical 

regional capacities and capabilities as resources for its recovery. 

Second, the boundaries (e.g., geographic, social, economic) of regional 

communities are diffcult to defne. As speakers observed, people living in 

suburbia, for example, are members of their bedroom communities on most 

nights and weekends while their working lives and social lives are likely to revolve 

around their nearby urban area. Further, businesses in a regional economic 

cluster may all rely on a single supplier located several states away. In developing 

metrics and standards, NIST will have to consider how to “bound” regional 

communities. 

Third, because many urban regions actually cross state lines, regional 

approaches to resilience are likely to be constrained by the welter of insurance, 

fnance, building codes, and utilities regulations that are governed state by state. 

Thus, attempts by regional communities that span more than one state to adopt 

and implement NIST-developed standards may be stymied by differences in state 

laws and regulations.
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26

Theme 4 - There are insufficient and inadequate incentives 

to stimulate creation and adoption of standards; in fact, 

there are significant disincentives. 

This theme was constant throughout both days of the symposium and generated 

some of the most intense discussion. There is also a clear linkage between this 

theme and the idea that infrastructure operates in a social context. Panelists and 

discussants all noted several challenges to incentivizing communities’ adoption of 

standards and resilient actions: 1) there are few tangible rewards for investing in 

resilience, yet investment in resilience strengthening is sometime costly; 2) routine 

effciency and optimization of infrastructures and community functions (e.g., 

eliminating redundancy and utilizing just-in-time delivery) are generally valued over 

continuity of function; 3) current business models emphasize the transference of 

risk to others (but not reducing or eliminating it); and 4) because it is unclear how 

to measure resilience (or what it is), it is diffcult to know what behaviors should 

be rewarded. Symposium participant comments stressed the frst, third, and last 

of these points in particular.

In addition to these challenges, plenary and work group discussions also 

pointed out that there are signifcant barriers to resilience that may undermine 

successful implementation of standards. Among the most prominent was the 

idea that federal government disaster relief, primarily but not exclusively through 

the Stafford Act, creates a signifcant and almost insurmountable disincentive 

to invest in resilience measures for large publicly owned infrastructure systems 

in particular. Specifcally, participants pointed out that twelve of the most costly 

insured catastrophes worldwide between 1970 and 2012 occurred since 2000 

and most of them were in the U.S. In the same time frame, U.S. presidential 

disaster declarations (allowing the federal government to cover a minimum of 

75% of the losses) have grown from fewer than 20 annually to close to 100 

annually, a trend that appears to be unsustainable.

Not only is the federal government’s increasing role in funding disaster recovery 

a drain on national resources but participants pointed out that it also creates a 

signifcant national moral hazard – a psychological tension regarding responsibility 

for the cost of recovery. This tension establishes expectations of federal 

government “rescues” and undermines market forces, which might otherwise 

incentivize investment in resilient behavior and penalize poor resilience choices. 

As one participant remarked, “It is diffcult to fnd anyone who is anti-resilient; 

but you do fnd people who believe that the federal government is going to, and 

should, bail them out.” 

Further, real risk is kept behind the curtain. Local, state and national leaders 

often remain willfully ignorant of the actual state of their risk and vulnerability 

within their jurisdictions. This is because to acknowledge risk creates a political 

liability where there is a public expectation for developing a response that elected 

offcials may believe to be unaffordable or politically impractical prior to the actual 

disaster. This cloaking of actual risk further disincentivizes resilient behavior and 

may derail attempts to implement resilience standards. Transparency breeds 

self-correcting behavior. This moral hazard extends beyond leaders to individuals 

and households who refuse to accept a personal responsibility for ignoring 

risk and expecting the federal government to step in and absorb the loss for 

foreseeable disasters. 

Behavior modifcation regarding risk is a clear imperative. Providing better 

models that can demonstrate to leaders, businesses, organizations and 

individuals sophisticated risk assessments and cost-beneft analysis in a practical, 

usable way may support good decisions on resilience investments. 

There is also a signifcant lack of available information regarding national liabilities. 

One of the participants noted, “What is the exposure on the public side of 

infrastructure? We don’t know. We can’t price something in the market without 

knowing what it is and there is little incentive to fnd out.”

Other than changes in policy, insurance was most often suggested as a way to 

incentivize resilience investments to mitigate risks and to get money back into a 

disaster area by guaranteeing claims payments with little delay. Insurance can, 

through premium adjustments, provide incentives to upgrade infrastructure before 

the next disaster. However, to be effective, the premiums must be allowed to 

refect real risk and provide signals to infrastructure owners of the real hazards 

they face. To assist communities in high hazard areas, governments may have to 

increase the incentives by providing low interest loans or even public funding for 

investments in mitigation measures.

In summary, the powerful group of resilience thought leaders assembled at 

this Symposium gave careful and insightful consideration to the creation of 

community and infrastructure standards and the incentives required to induce use 

of standards and investment in resilience. Their discussions and deliberations 

provided a wide range of ideas and concepts important to development of 

meaningful standards and underscored the necessity of effective incentives if 

standards are to be successfully implemented. The Symposium panels, work 

groups, and written input surfaced four themes critical to NIST’s on-going 

standards development process: 1) resilience building efforts need to focus 

on devising performance based standards that better assure the continuity of 

functions that are critical to the safety and well-being of communities; 2) social 

context is central to devising meaningful and lasting community and resilience 

standards; 3) resilience standards must be mindful of the regional context; and 

4) it is vitally important to identify and eliminate barriers to building resilience and 

to establish policy and economic incentives that support early and widespread 

adoption of standards when making infrastructure investments. Devoting 

appropriate attention to these themes will signifcantly enhance the success of 

NIST’s work in informing and advancing the resilience of America’s communities 

and infrastructure.
Appendix A

27

APPENDIX A

Symposium Questions:

• What are the practical, measurable standards for community resilience?

• What are the practical, measurable standards for infrastructure and buildings resilience? 

• What processes should be created to adopt and implement standards for community, infrastructure and buildings 

resilience? 

• What political, economic and social incentives can be created that would cause signifcant investment by the public 

sector, private sector, and individuals in bolstering community, infrastructure and buildings resilience? 

8:30-9:00 Sign-in and Cofee

9:00-9:30

Welcome and Introductions

Opening remarks from Steve Caufman (Lead for Disaster Resilience, NIST, )Mel Bernstein (Senior Vice Provost for 

Research & Graduate Education, Northeastern University), and Steve Flynn (Director, Center for Resilience Studies, 

Northeastern University)

9:30-11:00

Hurricane Sandy Case Study

Session Discussion Leader: 

 Stephen Flynn, Professor & Director, Center for Resilience Studies, 

 Northeastern University

Panelists:

David Abramson, Director, National Center for Disaster Preparedness, Columbia

 University 

Bill Raisch, Director, International Center for Enterprise Preparedness, NYU 

Michael Bruno, Dean, Schaefer School of Engineering and Science, Stevens

 Institute 

Howard Kunreuther, Professor & Co-Director, Wharton Risk Management and 

 Decision Processes Center, University of Pennsylvania 

Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Executive Director, Wharton Risk Management and 

 Decision Processes Center, University of Pennsylvania 

11:00-11:15 Break
Northeastern University • Center for Resilience Studies

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11:15-12:30

Community Resilience Trends

 Session Discussion Leaders:

Warren Edwards, Director, Community and Regional Resilience Institute

John Plodinec, Regional Technologies Associate Director, Community and Regional

 Resilience Institute 

Panelists:

Susan Cutter, Director, Hazards Research Lab, University of South Carolina

Scott Graham, Mid-Atlantic Division Disaster Executive, American Red Cross

David Kaufman, Associate Administrator for Policy, Program Analysis, and

 International Afairs, FEMA

Meir Elran, Senior Research Fellow, INSS, Tel Aviv University 

12:30-1:30 Lunch

 Afternoon Sessions

1:30-2:45

Infrastructure Resilience Trends

Session Discussion Leader: 

 Stephen Flynn, Professor & Director, Center for Resilience Studies, 

 Northeastern University

Panelists:

Najib Abboud, Principal and CTO, Wiedlinger Associates Inc.

Jerry Hajjar, Chair, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,

 Northeastern University 

Jalal Mapar, Director, Resilient Systems Division, DHS S&T

Steve Conrad, Manager, Resilience and Regulatory Efects Department, 

 Sandia National Laboratories 

Klaus Thoma, Director, Fraunhofer EMI 

2:45-3:15

Breakout Session Framing: Creating Resilience Standards – NIST Update

Steve Cauffman (NIST) will report on the progress of NIST’s ongoing effort to develop a national 

framework for devising standards that support the measuring and advancement of resilient communities and infrastructure. 

3:15-3:30 Break: Move to Breakout Sessions
Appendix A

29

3:30-5:00

Breakout Session A: Creating Infrastructure Resilience Standards

This facilitated discussion will yield recommendations for devising standards to support the measuring and advancement of built-infrastructure resilience. Several participants with expert and 

unique perspectives have been asked to provide leading thoughts to spark ideas and discussion. 

The group will present a 15-minute summary of its discussions and recommendations in plenary 

session on Day 2.

3:30-5:00

Breakout Session B: Creating Community Resilience Standards

This facilitated discussion will yield recommendations for devising standards to support the measuring and advancement of community resilience. Several participants with expert and unique 

perspectives have been asked to provide leading thoughts to spark ideas and discussion. The 

group will present a 15-minute summary of its discussions and recommendations in plenary session on Day 2.

3:30-5:00

Breakout Session C: Establishing and Adopting Resilience Standards

This facilitated discussion will yield recommendations for advancing a collaborative process 

amongst the multiple standards-setting entities that can play a supportive role in developing resilience standards. Several participants with expert and unique perspectives have been asked 

to provide leading thoughts to spark ideas and discussion. The group will present a 15-minute 

summary of its discussions and recommendations in plenary session on Day 2.

3:30-5:00

Breakout Session D: Creating Community Resilience Standards

This facilitated discussion will yield recommendations for devising standards to support the measuring and advancement of community resilience. Several participants with expert and unique 

perspectives have been asked to provide leading thoughts to spark ideas and discussion. The 

group will present a 15-minute summary of its recommendations in plenary session on Day 2.

5:00-5:10 Move to Wrap-up Session

5:10-5:20 Wrap Up and Adjourn for Day 1
Northeastern University • Center for Resilience Studies

30

 Day 2: Thursday, September 4, 2014

 8:00-8:30 Cofee

 8:30-9:00

Day 1 Recapitulation and Introduction to Day 2

Hosts: NIST and Center for Resilience Studies

9:00-10:00

Creating Incentives for Resilience Investments

Session Discussion Leader: 

 Stephen Flynn, Professor & Director, Center for Resilience Studies, 

 Northeastern University

Panelists:

Eric Letvin, Director, Hazard Mitigation and Risk Reduction Policy, NSC

Laureen Coyne, Director, Risk and Insurance Management, MTA

Roy Wright, Deputy Associate Administrator for Mitigation, FEMA

Debra Ballen, General Council and Senior Vice President of Public Policy, IBHS 

10:00-10:15 Move to Breakout Sessions

10:15-11:45

Breakout Session A: International Perspectives on Resilience Incentives and Global Issues

This facilitated discussion focuses on the use of policy, economic, and social incentives in the 

international arena to encourage resilient investments. Several international participants have 

been asked to provide leading thoughts to spark ideas and discussion. The group will be asked to 

present a 15-minute summary of its discussions and recommendations in plenary session.

10:15-11:45

Breakout Session B: Creating Policy Incentives for Resilience Investments

This facilitated discussion focuses on the creation and adoption of policy incentives for resilient 

investment in the United States. Several participants with expert and unique perspectives have 

been asked to provide leading thoughts to spark ideas and discussion. The group will be asked to 

present a 15-minute summary of its discussions and recommendations in plenary session.
Appendix A

31

10:15-11:45

Breakout Session C: Creating Economic Incentives for Resilience Investments

This facilitated discussion focuses on the creation and adoption of economic incentives for the 

United States. Several participants with expert and unique perspectives have been asked to provide leading thoughts to spark ideas and discussion. The group will present a 15-minute summary 

of its discussions and recommendations in plenary session.

10:15-11:45

Breakout Session D: Creating Policy Incentives for Resilience Investments

This facilitated discussion focuses on the creation and adoption of policy incentives for resilient 

investment in the United States. Several participants with expert and unique perspectives have 

been asked to provide leading thoughts to spark ideas and discussion. The group will be asked to 

present a 15-minute summary of its discussions and recommendations in plenary session.

11:45-1:00 Lunch

1:00-2:00

Breakout Group Reports – Creating Infrastructure Standards

Breakout groups from Day 1 will have 15 minutes to present the results and recommendations of 

their discussions.

2:00-3:00

Breakout Group Reports – Creating Incentives for Resilience Investments

Breakout groups from the morning will have 15 minutes to present the results and recommendations of their discussions.

3:00-3:15

Event Wrap-up & Next Steps

Steve Flynn and Steve Cauffman will offer concluding remarks and their thoughts about how to 

put the Symposium’s fndings into action.

3:15 Adjourn Day 2
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APPENDIX B

Day 1, Breakout A: Creating Infrastructure Resilience Standards

1) Ask discussants to frame the group conversation with brief remarks that:

 a. Recap what they think are the most important performance goals 

 for infrastructure resilience standards

 b. Identify standards/codes/guidelines that are being used or developed currently

 c. Provide examples of gaps in current codes or practices that should be ad 

 dressed by standards

2) As conversation matures, questions to ask group:

 a. Can we defne or describe criteria for critical infrastructure resilience?

 b. What standards must be developed in order to strengthen CI resilience? Are 

 there some natural frst standards that we should lead with?

 c. What are consistent performance goals or metrics for critical infrastructure?

 i. Buildings iv. Water

 ii. Transportation v. Communications and Information

 iii. Energy 

Day 1, Breakout B: Creating Community Resilience Standards

1) Ask discussants to frame the group conversation with brief remarks that:

 a. Recap what they think are the most important considerations for establishing 

 community resilience standards

 b. Help identify the important elements of community resilience to measure

 c. Identify steps/actions/approaches that address challenges to development of 

 standards

 d. Provide examples of practices that are helping to develop community standards

2) As conversation matures, questions to ask group:

 a. Are there elements or approaches that MUST be part of any successful process 

 to establish COMMUNITY resilience standards (in other words, if we don’t 

 do XXX, we will never get usable standards established)?

 b. What stakeholders must be involved? 

 c. What standards must be developed in order to strengthen COMMUNITY 

 resilience? Are there some natural frst standards that we should lead with? 

 d. What actions could YOUR organization take that would contribute to develop 

 ment of resilience standards?

 e. What steps can be taken to ensure various domains/ jurisdictions adopt & use 

 standards?

Day 1, Breakout C: Establishing and Adopting Resilience Standards

1) Ask discussants to frame the group conversation with brief remarks that:

 a. Recap what they think are the most important considerations for establishing 

 community resilience standards
Appendix B

33

 b. Help identify the important elements of community resilience to measure 

 c. Comment on which existing standard setting entities should be included in the 

 development, validation and adoption process for resilience standards (community 

 and infrastructure).

 d. Identify steps/actions/approaches that address challenges to development and adoption 

 of standards

2) As conversation matures, questions to ask group:

 a. Are there elements or approaches that MUST be part of any successful process to establish 

 CI or COMMUNITY resilience standards (in other words, if we don’t do XXX, we will ever get 

 usable standards established)?

 b. What stakeholders must be involved? 

 c. What actions could YOUR organization take that would contribute to development of 

 resilience standards?

 d. What steps can be taken to ensure various domains/ jurisdictions adopt & use standards?

Day 1, Breakout D: Creating Infrastructure Resilience Standards

1) Ask discussants to frame the group conversation with brief remarks that:

 a. Recap what they think are the most important performance goals for infrastructure resilience 

 standards

 b. Identify standards/codes/guidelines that are being used or developed currently

 c. Provide examples of gaps in current codes or practices that should be addressed by standards

2) As conversation matures, questions to ask group:

 a. Can we defne or describe criteria for critical infrastructure resilience?

 b. What standards must be developed in order to strengthen CI resilience? Are there some 

 natural frst standards that we should lead with?

 c. What are consistent performance goals or metrics for critical infrastructure?

 i. Buildings iv. Water

 ii. Transportation v. Communications and Information

 iii. Energy 

 

Day 2, Breakout A: International Perspectives on Resilience Incentives & Global Issues

1) Ask discussants to frame the group conversation with brief remarks that:

 a. Provide examples of policy, economic, or social incentives that support greater resilience 

 investment

 b. Identify an issue with resilience investment and suggest an approach for overcoming

 c. Identify collaborative actions that could help address global issues with resilience investment

2) As conversation matures, questions to ask group:

 a. Can we defne or describe common criteria for effective resilience investment?

 b. How can we strengthen public/private partnership in providing incentives for resilience 

 investment?

 c. What successful practices can be leverage/borrow from one another?

Day 2, Breakout B: Creating Policy Incentives for Resilience Investments
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1) Ask discussants to frame the group conversation with brief remarks that:

 a. Provide examples of policy incentives that support greater resilience investment

 b. Identify an issue with resilience investment and suggest policy incentive for overcoming

 c. Identify collaborative actions that could result in improved policy incentives

2) As conversation matures, questions to ask group:

 a. Are there policy incentives that MUST be enacted in order to move resilience investment 

 forward?

 b. Are there policy incentives that we can enact within current authorities?

 c. How can the private sector better support stronger policy incentives for resilience investment?

 d. What successful practices can we leverage or borrow?

Day 2, Breakout C: Creating Economic Incentives for Resilience Investments

1) Ask discussants to frame the group conversation with brief remarks that:

 a. Provide examples of economic incentives that support greater resilience investment

 b. Identify an issue with resilience investment and suggest an economic incentive for overcoming

 c. Identify collaborative actions that could result in improved economic incentives

 d. Identify disincentives to resilience investments that must be addressed so that economic 

 incentives can be created

2) As conversation matures, questions to ask group:

 a. What are the economic incentives that MUST be enacted in order to move resilience 

 investment forward?

 b. What policy or economic disincentives must be addressed to make new economic incentives 

 realistic?

 c. Are there economic incentives that we can enact within insurance, fnancial, lending models?

 d. How can government policy better support stronger private sector incentives from insurance, 

 banking, CI owner/operators for resilience investment?

 e. What successful practices can we leverage or borrow?

Day 2, Breakout A: International Perspectives on Resilience Incentives & Global Issues

1) Ask discussants to frame the group conversation with brief remarks that:

 a. Provide examples of policy, economic, or social incentives that support greater resilience 

 investment

 b. Identify an issue with resilience investment and suggest an approach for overcoming

2) Identify collaborative actions that could help address global issues with resilience As conversation 

 matures, questions to ask group:

 a. Can we defne or describe common criteria for effective resilience investment?

 b. How can we strengthen public/private partnership in providing incentives for resilience 

 investment?

 c. What successful practices can be leverage/borrow from one another?
Appendix C

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APPENDIX C

PARTICIPANT WHITE PAPERS

Papers:

C.1: ‘Resilience of what & to what; for whom & against what?’, Jennifer Giroux, Senior Researcher, Center for Security 

Studies, ETH Zurich

C.2: Themes and Thoughts Arising from the NIST International Resilience Symposium, John Plodinec, Associate Director, 

Resilience Technologies, Community and Regional Resilience Institute 

C.3: Refections on Enhancing Community and Infrastructure Resilience, Tom Wilbanks, Senior Corporate Fellow, Oak Ridge 

National Laboratory

C.4: Resilience to natural disasters: the role of standards, Tim Davies, Department of Geological Sciences, University of 

Canterbury, New Zealand

C.5: Societal Resilience, Meir Elran, Senior Research Fellow, Institute of National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University

C.6: Refections on the International Resilience Symposium, Russell E. Bowman

Several Symposium participants were asked to write papers (provided here in Appendix C) on resilience building 

standards and incentives, drawing from their expertise and their reflections on the Symposium discussions. These papers 

are solely the work of their authors and do not represent views held or endorsed by the Center for Resilience Studies, the 

George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security, Northeastern University, or the Meridian Institute. 
Northeastern University • Center for Resilience Studies

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C.1: ‘Resilience of what & to what; for whom & against what? 

-- Reflections from the International Symposium on Disaster 

Resilience ’, Jennifer Giroux, Senior Researcher, Center for Security 

Studies, ETH Zurich

In September 2014 a diverse group of practitioners and academics were brought together for the International 

Symposium on Developing Standards for Disaster Resilience of Buildings, Infrastructure and Communities, 

hosted by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in partnership with the Center for Resilience 

Studies at Northeastern University. This report features refections on some of the key themes, fndings and 

recommendations that fowed from the symposium.

Author

Jennifer Giroux is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Security Studies (CSS)/ETH Zurich. The views in this 

report are her own and do not necessarily refect the views of CSS/ETH Zurich.

Acknowledgments

This paper was informed by key refections from the symposium, many of which have been addressed while 

working on resilience topics at CSS/ETH Zurich where I work with the Risk & Resilience Team. My colleague 

Tim Prior also attended the symposium and together we discussed some of the key themes that captured our 

attention some of which are refected in this paper. 
Appendix C

37

Introduction

“What makes a city resilient? What enables a devastated metropolis to rebuild its physical fabric and recover its social 

fabric and cultural identity?” 1

The symposium on ‘Developing Standards for Disaster Resilience of Buildings, Infrastructure and 

Communities’ was an excellent 2-day meeting that identifed a number of the key themes and challenges 

that come with identifying and implementing the standards needed for building (or enhancing) the 

resilience of the built environment where socio-technical systems overlap. Of course this is no easy 

task given that the built environment is challenged by innate and systemic complexity, particularly in 

relation to the various issues that impact physical and social vulnerability. On one level these issues 

include increased and changing demands on services, meaning of infrastructure (for social systems) and 

its general deterioration (often caused by ageing). On another level these issues are caused by the effects 

of various hazards - from social unrest and terrorism to climate change and extreme weather events, to 

name a few. Consequently, Coaffee (2013) aptly describes how resilience has “come to symbolize the 

response to a range of environmental crises and economic recessionary ‘shocks’.”2

Over the course of 2-days the multidisciplinary group of participants covered numerous themes and 

issues, not all of which could or should be covered in this report. Rather the topics I will address here 

connect to my refections during panels and the breakout sessions that I attended (day 1 group B; day 2 

group A) as well as the themes/issues that I found most compelling based on my own background and 

experience. Overall, I often felt like the group was grappling with very basic questions, namely: ‘resilience 

of what and to what; for whom and against what?’ Given this, the refections in this paper will connect to 

this theme that, for me, seemed to underlie many discussions and debates. 

The following section will pick up the question ‘resilience of what’ by trying to untangle and 

contextualize the difference between the resilience of social and technical systems. While, reviewing 

the NIST documents and talking to NIST colleagues it’s clear that factoring in the social system is 

an important one in the effort to build standards for the built environment. That said it seems that 

this effort is still a bit problematic. I suggest one way to better factor in the social system may be to 

distinguish between critical infrastructures and critical social infrastructures. Following this I will briefy 

discuss my observations regarding the way risk management is being used in the discussion on resilience. 

I think that this is a critical discussion particularly given that it informs the resource allocation process. 

Finally I use the concluding section that highlights a various recommendations that I found particularly 

compelling, such as: importance of engaging communities in the risk process, educational activities, 

international adoption of the Hyogo Framework, and the support of collaborative research activities that 

can fund info sharing, community case studies and rapid response research teams. 

1 Campanella, T.J. (2006): Urban Resilience and the Recovery of New Orleans, Journal of the American Planning 

Association, 72(2), p141.

2 Coaffee, J. (2013). Rescaling and Responsibilising the Politics of Urban Resilience: From National Security to Local Place-making. Politics 33(4), p.241.
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Resilience of What? Making a distinction between critical infrastructures & 

critical social infrastructures

“Resilient Cities are constructed to be strong and fexible rather than brittle and fragile... their lifeline systems of roads, 

utilities and other support facilities are designed to continue functioning in the face of rising water, high winds, shaking ground 

and terrorist attacks.” 3 

As a social scientist with a background in Anthropology and policy I have found that my view of resilience 

is often different from my colleagues who come from a more technical background (e.g. those working on 

complex physical systems such as road networks, energy infrastructure and the like). For them resilience is 

a return to a previous state, it is, as Berkes (2007) defnes, ‘the ability to withstand or cope with a disaster 

by absorbing or withstanding the disturbance without losing core functionality.’ But from a social (science) 

perspective, resilience is about movement, transformation, and (often) using the event as a catalyst for 

change. In this respect, in my understanding of resilience I question whether physical infrastructures can 

have adaptive, emergent capacities, which are inherent qualities of resilient systems? To illustrate it another 

way, while the former may refer to resilience as ‘bouncing back’ the latter increasingly uses the phrase 

‘bouncing forward’4 Manyena et al. (2011) – a phrase which captures the participatory and adaptive capacity 

within social systems and the ability of communities to make meaningful choices about their recovery 

process. 

In breakout group B on Day 1, such differences in understanding were clear. As a group we questioned 

whether it is even possible to set standards for ‘communities’. Indeed as Alberti et al. (2003) aptly note, 

the built environment “has rich spatial and temporal heterogeneity—a complex mosaic of biological and 

physical patches in a matrix of infrastructure, human organizations, and social institutions.”5 Unpacking 

and understanding this complexity is challenging, let alone defning or understanding its resilience, 

particularly because complex socio-technical systems represent constantly evolving and dynamic spaces that 

cannot be simply understood as the sum of their parts. Resilience can and does mean different things to 

different parts of such systems, thus invoking questions like: resilience of what and to what? resilience for 

whom? and against what?.6 Along this line, Giroux and Prior (2013) debated whether “resilience was about 

returning to a pre-disturbance state quickly? Or does resilience also involve change and transformation, 

which might result from experiential learning and the development of adaptive capacities?”7 Table 1 

distinguishes these two types of resilience. 

3 Godschalk, D.R. (2003). Urban Hazard Mitigation: Creating Resilient Cities. Natural Hazards Review, 4(3), pp.136-142

4 Manyena, S., O’Brien, G., O’Keefe, P. and Rose, J. (2011). Disaster resilience; A bounce back or bounce forward ability. Local Environment, 16, pp. 417-424.

5 Alberti, M. et al (2003): Integrating Humans into Ecology: Opportunities and Challenges for Studying Urban Ecosystems. BioScience 53(12), p.1171.

6 Hassler, U. & Kohler, N. (2014): Resilience in the built environment. Building Research & Information, 42(2), p.122.

7 Giroux, J. & Prior, T. (2013): Expressions of Resilience: From ‘Bounce Back’ to Adaptation. Factsheet, Risk & Resilience Team, Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich, p. 4.
Appendix C

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One possible way to better anchor the social system into efforts to develop standards for the built 

environment might be to distinguish critical infrastructures (CI) and critical social infrastructures (CSI), 

the latter of which would include service such as informal and formal health services, relief organizations, 

etc., that often help communities cope with the impact of CI disruptions.8 Rather than lumping those 

services into CI it may be helpful in this process to set standards for and distinguish CSI for the adaptive 

and emergent qualities that they possess (whereas CI systems are largely about bouncing back to previous 

state). Increasingly there is growing awareness that local residents are the frst at the scene in the immediate 

aftermath of sudden on-set disasters. As discussed by Cole, Walters and Lynch (2011) they often constitute 

informal ‘crowd-sourced’ search and rescue teams and provide frst aid assistance.9 In the hours, days 

and weeks that follow, there is also evidence that spontaneous and informal networks may begin working 

more or less cooperatively with organizations that have formally trained for such events Brennan and 

Flint (2007).10 In this respect, CI resilience within the built environment is better understood with an 

appreciation of the role that critical social infrastructures play in helping a community cope with the 

immediate and adverse effects caused by disruptions or damages to the built environment. In many cases, 

when CIs fail due to a hazard event, CSIs can be there to cushion the fall and provide another layer of 

support – or, to take a term from resilience studies, a type of redundancy – until CI can be restored. For 

instance, during a crisis the shutdown of hospitals often results in the social system shifting health services 

to other spaces, such as park or some other type of building that provides shelter, or providing mobile 

care. Another instructive example of the importance of social infrastructures lies in the danger posed 

by an epidemic: in such a case the built environment and technical infrastructures are left intact, but the 

social infrastructures are devastated, possibly including mass exodus of people, abandonment of critical 

infrastructures and their maintenance. 

8 For a full discussion on the role of CSI within the context of urban resilience see: Giroux, J. and Herzog, M. (2014). Urban Resilience: considering technical and social infrastructures in complex human environments. SKI 

Focus Report 10, Risk & Resilience Team, Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich, p. 4.

9 Cole, J., Walters, M. and Lynch, M. (2011). Part of the solution, not the problem: the crowd's role in emergency response. Contemporary Social Science: Journal of the Academy of Social Sciences, 6, pp. 361-375.

10 Brennan, M. and Flint, C. (2007). Uncovering the hidden dimensions of rural disaster mitigation; capacity building through community emergency response teams. Southern Rural Sociology, 22, pp. 111-126.
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Setting standards for CSI’s could be conducted by conceptualizing CSIs across the ‘4R’ framework, which 

is well known in the disaster risk reduction (DDR) 

discussion: 

• Reduction (or prevention): identifying and, if 

possible, eliminating or reducing risk through, 

for example, land-use planning that prevents 

residential development in food zones. 

• Readiness (or preparedness): Developing 

organizational and community-based operational 

systems (CSIs), capabilities and programmes 

before a disaster.

• Response: CSI actions taken immediately after 

disaster to save lives and property, and restore 

essential services. Examples include assembling 

and deploying search and rescue teams or sourcing 

potable water.

• Recovery: Refection on the role of CSI in disaster; perform research and evaluation on effectiveness; 

incorporate lessons learned into strengthening CSI for future disasters. In the recovery phase, 

resilience is about both coping and using the event as a catalyst for positive change. To note one 

example, the small town of Kaiapoi that was impacted by the Canterbury earthquakes developed a 

‘Hub’ that provided a range of council- and community-based services, and co-locating engineering 

and social recovery teams there, they enabled the co-production of short and mid-term solutions to 

take place. The goal of this approach was to enable the community to undertake their own recovery 

by empowering local service providers and using a full range of engagement strategies in their 

communications.

Another way to capture the role of CSIs that could inform standards is one that follows a framework 

noted by numerous studies on resilience, the main factors that must be considered include the following 

(as illustrated in Figure 2): redundancy, fexibility, reorganization, learning and revision. Discussion of CI 

resilience in the built environment often refers to the redundancy of CI systems, which is often referred to 

as linear and design-based concept. In our conceptualization, CI redundancy can refer to back-up power 

(e.g. generators), for example, but it can also refer to back-up CSI. For example, when power failures left 

half of New York City in the dark after the 2012 Superstorm Sandy, CSI services emerged to provide 

centers where people could gain access to electricity until traditional services were restored. Typically, 

redundancy measures are factored and built into the system before a crisis occurs.

Increasingly, many unique response measures are emerging that are signals of adaptive capacities and 

fexibility. In the Netherlands, for instance, a legal tool called “land re-adjustment” has been adapted to 

include areas that are below sea level and thus most at risk for fooding. According to Russell: “When a 

community is threatened, its land is re-allocated elsewhere and property lines redrawn.”11 Another example 

11 Parry, W. Future Disasters: 10 Lessons from Superstorm Sandy. Live Science, 28 January 2013. http://www.livescience.com/26640-future-disasters-lessons-superstorm-sandy.html
Appendix C

41

includes relief and, more ad-hoc, volunteer efforts that emerge during a crisis. During the February 2014 

fooding disaster in the United Kingdom a website was created within fve hours that allowed volunteers to 

offer time, supplies and resources.12 Such ad-hoc efforts operate alongside more traditional or formal relief 

efforts, such as those offered by the Salvation Army.13 Both, however, are part of the portrait of critical 

social infrastructures that have self-organizing, emergent properties.

Indeed, examining the built environment holistically reveals an incredibly dynamic system that is able to 

absorb shocks in ways that avoid catastrophic failure – and in many respects this ability to avoid failure 

is very much a socially driven phenomenon. Individuals, and with that CSI, can be fexible during a 

hazard event, whereas there is less inherent fexibility and adaptability in fxed technical systems. In other 

words, where CI redundancy might fail during a hazard event, the partnered nature of CSI may confer 

the necessary fexibility to adapt the technical system to the circumstances and ensure the delivery of 

the essential services normally provided by CIs. For example, ad hoc shelters powered by generators can 

provide people with certain temporary services until power is restored. 

Similarly, the ability to reorganize is another key component of the urban resilient system and one that 

is driven by the social elements of a system. Socio-technical systems have the ability to temporarily or 

permanently adapt, change and evolve in response to changing conditions because people drive them. As 

such, CSIs hold the ability to learn and revise actions and processes based on past experiences, and to 

identify and address relevant problems to ensure that actions are taken on the basis of relevant information 

and experiences. Within the urban space this factor is applicable to both CI and CSI as separate domains, 

but also in relation to each other. For example, during a hazard event, certain CI vulnerabilities can be 

illuminated, which then lead to actions that address those vulnerabilities post-event, by strengthening 

technical assets and implementing redundancy measures. These measures may include strengthening critical 

social infrastructures to help people cope during and post-crisis until CI can be restored, or to ensure CI 

can be restored. 

From risk-based to resilience-based management

Despite all the talk of ‘new risk environment’, one which calls for a new approach that falls under the 

heading of ‘resilience’ we have yet to make the distinction between resilience vs. risk management but 

rather lump the two terms together. Risk Management processes begins with a review of risks (generated 

during risk estimation, characterization, and evaluation processes). From there, managers determine which 

risks are acceptable (no further management needed), tolerable (but risk reduction measures are necessary), 

or intolerable or contested. This process then informs the allocation of resources to mitigate and manage 

risks, particularly for the acceptable or tolerable risks but the intolerable or contested risks are more 

problematic in the risk-based resource allocation process. The term ‘resilience’ emerged within the context 

of a changing environment that is characterized by uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. In such contexts, 

risk management, and thus risk-based resource allocation, is not an effective process or mechanism to 

deal with the risk environ (since the risks are unknown or contested which means that resources will not 

be properly allocated to build more resilient infrastructures). Rather we need to distinguish resilience 

12 See: http://foodvolunteers.co.uk/

13 See: http://www.salvationarmy.org.uk/uki/Northwest_foodrelief
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management from risk management: with resilience management you do not start with defning the risks 

but rather with defning the system (e.g. its behavior and functions).

Indeed, many of the criticisms of traditional risk analyses and the risk management approach in the context 

of the shifting risk environment are closely associated with the formulaic and quantitative nature of the 

practice. In many ways, this approach seems a poor match to planning for and mitigating risk events, which 

are inherently characterized by a large variety of non-quantitative properties. In addition, the social element 

of disasters, and the socially driven processes associated with planning for disasters suggests the necessity 

to incorporate social factors into assessments of risk in the practice of risk management. The formulaic 

nature of the risk analysis step in the risk management cycle, while traditionally accepted and trusted, 

seems to fundamentally limit the application of these analyses to real-world risk management problems and 

situations. How to address this limitation is an important point of discussion:14

• How do newer approaches to risk management, like the development of national risk registers, 

improve planning processes by inherently incorporating planning and risk assessment processes? Do 

such approaches actually present better alternatives or increase the transparency of risk and planning 

processes?

• Can risk analyses be conducted in a community-based and deliberative fashion? Would this improve the 

way contextual characteristics in the ‘risk system’ are incorporated? 

• With community/stakeholder involvement does awareness about planning practices and outcomes 

increase? Do processes and outcomes become appropriately transparent?

• How can qualitative scenario, forecasting or back-casting techniques be incorporated into risk 

assessments to better address uncertainties, unpredictability and interdependencies?

• Are scenario-independent resilience approaches prospectively better alternatives to dealing with and 

improving hazard event planning processes? 

This debate between risk management vs. resilience management is an emerging debate in Switzerland 

within the context of allocating resources for unknowable, intolerable and/or contested risks. Switzerland’s 

Federal Offce for Civil Protection uses the generic risk management process shown in Figure 1, which 

highlights sequential relationships between disruptive events and activities (i.e. steps shown in fgure 1 like 

preparation, intervention, Recondition, etc.) from the civil protection system, which are typically temporally 

variable. While the relationships between activities and events are clearly represented in cycles like 

Switzerland’s, the process of negotiating the relationships, and determining how steps are made between 

the points on a risk management cycle are not always clear or transparent. However because this process is 

focused on the risk (i.e. center circle “assessing hazards and risk”) rather than the system characteristics it 

does not always help in the allocation of resources for the more problematic and uncertain risks.

14 For a more in depth discussion on this see the forthcoming report: Prior, T. and Giroux, J. From risk analysis to preparedness planning: Linking consequence and likelihood; vulnerability and capability. Discussion paper: 

4th D-A-CH Risk Workshop “Risk Analysis” 28.-30. April 2014, Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, Germany Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich (forthcoming)
Appendix C

43

A resilience management approach would begin with defning the system via modeling and simulation of 

complex systems in the built environment. Through this process you can determine the critical nodes, 

points of vulnerability, simulate behavior during various types of risks, etc. From there risk managers 

can focus on critical points that require more investment. However such a process requires changing 

mindsets. While technical risk managers may be aware of risk and consequence, the same cannot be said 

of the average person. In many cases the latter group are asked to hold faith in technical risk analyses, risk 

mapping and the like, without the ability to draw on their own experiences to supplement institutional 

advice and direction. Thus perhaps a way to develop more support for a resilience management approach 

and the allocation of, in some cases, signifcant resources would be to adopt a standard for discoursebased management which requires a participatory process involving various stakeholders; the goal being to 

produce a collective understanding of the system, how to interpret the situation (including changing risk 

picture), and how to design procedures. 

Another related point pertains to the assumed relationship between risk analyses and planning, one 

that is founded on the contested notion that risk awareness and perception results in mitigation.15 Risk 

communication has historically been the mechanism used to connect risk analyses and mitigation, but the 

15 Ibid.
Northeastern University • Center for Resilience Studies

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effectiveness of traditional (often passive) mechanisms that seek to increase risk awareness is now being 

challenged. While risk communication certainly must play a role in the risk analysis-planning relationship, 

new methods or techniques must be developed and adopted that adequately draw on information derived 

from risk analyses to inform effective planning and encourage mitigation activities.

Of course the risk analysis process is a standard practice in risk management. The practice has remained 

largely unaltered and is maintained as a central element in novel approaches to risk management like the 

development risk registers. Yet, the utility of traditional (and even more contextualized) risk analyses is 

limited when dealing with complex, uncertain or ambiguous risks, where drivers, dimensions, and technical 

characteristics are contested or unknown. In this case it is not possible to draw from historical data, which 

is inherently backward looking; rather, attention shifts to risk awareness and capability development. 

Risk governance expert Ortwin Renn has discussed the different approaches that are required for the 

management of more complex risks.16 Renn (2008) highlights that effectively dealing with different 

types of risk (simple, complex, or ambiguous, etc.) necessitates varying approaches with respect to the 

participants and their level of involvement (fgure 3). For instance, more ambiguous risks require a more 

extensive participatory process that includes actors from civil society, government, academia, and beyond. 

The goal here is not necessarily to identify/defne and measure risks, but rather to reach consensus or 

tolerance for risk evaluation results and management options. Regarding this framework the following 

questions emerge:

• Does this framework represent a viable and effective means of actually linking risk analyses with 

planning processes in a practical way?

• Here the focus on risk analysis may become secondary to an assessment of the social, technical, 

economic and environmental characteristics of a system, and to an assessment of vulnerability and 

capability – could such a repositioning within the risk management cycle be valid or realistic?

16 Renn, O. (2008) Risk governance: coping with uncertainty in a complex world. Earthscan
Appendix C

45

Final Refections: Highlighting key action items

In addition to the points made in the two previous sections, I wanted to highlight specifc recommendations 

that caught my attention during the symposium.

Education activities & engaging stakeholders in the risk process 

I’ve already spoken quite a bit about engaging stakeholders in the risk process (in previous section) however 

one area that was not fully explored during the symposium is the role of education in general. In terms of 

setting infrastructure standards that incorporate the social system, the NIST could inform standards on 

resilience education that could be targeted towards a variety of different stakeholders. The uncertainty/

complexity factor that is correlated with resilience thinking represents a starting point for an exploration 

and a systematic re-think of how we view, respond and manage our environment. As a few speakers 

noted, ‘there is a need to meet people where they are’ when it comes to building resilience. For me this 

implied incorporating resilience thinking and principles into areas that are part of their every day as well 

as designing educational programs that could be targeted to offcials, students in K-12 and after-school 

programs, business owners, etc. Such programs can be helpful for increasing risk awareness, changing 

behavior, and have the social and political capital to support the funding needed to build/enhance resilience 

when resources need to be allocated. I would recommend looking at some of the insights provided in the 

RAND study “Building Community Resilience” which examines community education efforts, such as 

building public risk literacy (though focused on public health issues), activities to train agencies, etc.17 

Additional points on the topic of engagement relate to how we view critical (physical) infrastructures vs. 

social infrastructures. In the former we have public private partnerships (PPP) whereby the private sector 

plays a role in decision-making, given their direct involvement in business continuity and contingency 

planning. However when we talk about community resilience we are fnding that communities are being 

given “toolkits” & “guides for communities” that are created by government bodies. In the UK toolkit for 

building community resilience they even have instructions on developing leaders and volunteers and how 

they can organize. This state-centric approach made up of technical fxes basically goes against the principle 

of resilience. In a way, they read as though government is telling the community, on the one hand, to be 

resourceful and have self-help qualities but, on the other hand, it also telling them (through these explicit, 

detailed instructions) what their emergent behavior needs to be. In other words, it excludes citizens from 

decision-making process but also seeks to make them more responsible. In many respect this reveals how 

much government bodies are struggling with understanding resilience and adopting a resilience approach. 

By this I am referring to the tension between different types of management approaches: traditional 

hierarchical management is known as linear, structured, symmetrical, etc. But a resilience approach, 

especially when understood through the prism of complex adaptive systems theory, should be inclusive, 

dynamic, non-linear, etc. Thus, in considering ways to engage stakeholders in the process of building 

resilience it is important to refect on the management structure and how that will impact individual 

and community agency. In this respect, agency means giving people the platform to frst articulate what 

resilience means for their community and then developing the capacity for people to engage, make 

decisions and participate in that process. Indeed, not acknowledging the role of community agency in the 

process of developing community resilience could actually do more harm in the long run. 

17 Chandra, A. et al (2011). Building Community Resilience to Disasters. RAND Technical Report.
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Hyogo Framework

I appreciated the suggestion that as NIST embarks on developing resilience standards that they should 

examine the process underway with the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), which has been active since 

2005 and will continue until 2015. The HFA was established in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami 

in 2004,18 and represents arguably the most comprehensive attempt to set a global agenda for the reduction 

of disaster risks, and to monitor the implementation of that agenda. With the HFA coming to end in 2015, 

consultations and deliberations on all political levels are under way regarding a new international framework 

for the post-2015 period: commonly referred to as HFA2. During the symposium I questioned whether 

NIST had examined this process and to what degree it could inform this process in the US. As Roth and 

Prior note in the forthcoming report “The Hyogo Framework for Action successor and the prospects for 

international disaster risk reduction initiatives”19 a critical contribution of HFA has been its contribution 

to the establishment of a global culture of safety and resilience:

“A case in point is the online website PreventionWeb,20 run by UNISDR, which functions as a rich information 

resource and networking platform for practitioners and students in the feld of disaster management, for example by 

providing shared defnitions. Moreover, the HFA process has triggered the identifcation of best practices from all 

parts of the world that allows mutual and multicultural learning. A case in point is UNISDR's "Making Cities 

Resilient"21 campaign.” (pg 4) 

In this report they provided a useful table, provided here, that breaks down of HFA achievements and 

remaining challenges.22 

18 http://www.preventionweb.net/english/professional/publications/v.php?id=1037&pid:22&pif:3

19 Roth, F. and Prior, T. The Hyogo Framework for Action successor and the prospects for international disaster risk reduction initiatives. Risk & Resilience Team, Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich, Forthcoming.

20 http://www.preventionweb.net

21 http://www.unisdr.org/campaign/resilientcities/

22 Roth, F. and Prior, T. (forthcoming), pg. 4.
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Investing in research

Many of the recommendations provided at the symposium revealed that we are still lacking information 

and understanding of resilience in socio-technical systems. There is a rich literature of studies on critical 

infrastructure systems modeling and resilience as well as a rich literature on the qualities and behavior 

of resilient social systems. However there is little work that brings these worlds together. While I agree 

with the suggestion to carry out case studies or even deploy rapid research teams (following a disaster) 

there needs to be a common framework used for such an effort in order to compare the different cultures 

of resilience and enhance the modeling and simulation of social systems in the built environment. Just 

as systems modeling identifes component parts, research on the social system embedded in the built 

environment needs to, as Paton et al (2014) note, “identify the capacities that exist at personal, community, 

and societal levels and how they are integrated to facilitate individual and collective ability to cope, adapt, 

recover and learn from environmental hazard consequences.”23 One interesting framework developed by 

Paton et al (2014) could be useful for such comparative analysis (see fgure 4), however it would need to be 

modifed/adapted to incorporate more elements (or factors) of the built environment as well as the critical 

social infrastructures (previously discussed) that exist in the social space. 

 Figure 4: Paton et al framework24 that shows responses to adaptive demands (over time) as well as adaptive 

capacities and interdependencies at various levels.

23 Paton. D. et al (2014). Chapter 15 Recovery and Development: Perspectives from New Zealand and Australia. In N. Kapucu, K. T. Liou (eds.), Disaster and Development, Environmental Hazards, Springer International 

Publishing Switzerland, pg. 256.

24 Ibid, pg. 259.
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C.2: Themes and Thoughts Arising from the NIST Inter national 

Resilience Symposium, John Plodinec, Associate Director, Resilience 

Technologies, Community and Regional Resilience Institute 

Themes and Thoughts Arising from the NIST International

Resilience Symposium

INTRODUCTION

The Center for Resilience Studies at Northeastern University and the National Institute of

Standards and Technology held a two-day International Resilience Symposium 3-4 September,

2014. The purpose of the Symposium was to provide illumination on four questions:

• What are practical, measurable standards for community resilience?

• What are practical, measurable standards for infrastructure and buildings resilience?

• What processes should be created to adopt and implement standards for community, 

infrastructure and buildings resilience?

•	 What political, economic and social incentives can be created that would cause signifcant

investment by the public sector, private sector, and individuals in bolstering community, 

infrastructure and buildings resilience?

A few themes seemed to weave the presentations and breakout sessions together. In the 

following, some of the more important themes are presented along with my observations from 

the perspective of a practitioner in community resilience.

Theme: Communities should take a “resilience-centric” approach to their built environment 

that considers

• Cushionability.

• Resistance.

• Robustness.

• Redundancy.

• Graceful extensibility or failure.
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Observation:

There seemed to be general support for this concept.		However, there is no unique mix of these fve

properties, i.e., when a community applies the concept to their particular situation, they may choose 

to emphasize one or more of these and ignore the rest. Further, the community’s policy choices are 

likely to also depend on the specifc part of the built environment being considered.

For example, when the Charleston, SC, region looked at the resilience of its health care system to 

earthquakes it quickly concluded that perhaps only 20% of its hospital beds would be available. 

Rather than trying to make its hospitals and clinics more resistant, the regional community chose to 

position “redundant” health care assets (essentially conex boxes adapted to medical use) at eighteen 

locations around the community. Conversely, when the bridge over the Cooper River was rebuilt, 

resistance was emphasized - the bridge was designed to withstand a magnitude 7.4 earthquake.

The key is that communities, in general, seem to focus on functions, not assets (e.g., health care, 

not hospitals).		This points directly to one of the major diffculties facing NIST as they try to

setstandards and metrics for community resilience. 

There are a variety of strategies that a community may choose to maintain some semblance 

of functionality during and after a disruptive event. Further, a community may choose 

different strategies for different functional areas. Thus, in developing standards NIST 

should take care it does not preclude valid approaches that communities might choose.

Theme: NIST should consider developing three types of standards:

• Process standards, for inclusive processes that could be used by communities and other 

owners of infrastructure and buildings to develop and implement strategies to minimize 

suffering and maximize the rate of recovery of the community.

• Component standards, to assure the survival (or quick recovery) of critical assets.

• Performance standards that are focused on the rapid recovery of functionality rather 

than the resistance of a specifc component.

Observations:

The three types of standards were discussed during the meeting with little care to differentiate 

among them or to provide NIST with more detailed guidance about what might be considered and 

what NIST’s role might be.
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The following refects the Community and Regional Resilience Institute’s (CARRI) experience

working with communities. It is intended to help NIST identify some areas where each of the 

types of standards could be useful.

Process standards

In CARRI’s experience, communities have great diffculty in identifying the types of 

disasters they may face, and then developing and implementing strategies to deal with 

them. NIST could provide real value if it promulgated standards that refected proven 

processes for each.

A standard for identifcation of the types of disasters a community may face should not be

considered an exercise in risk management. First, it may not be possible to assign a probability 

that a particular disruption will occur. Second, even if probabilities could be assigned to single 

types of disruptions (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes, foods) that might not be useful if a community

potentially could face a combination of disruptions. Charleston, SC, was just recovering from the 

“Great Cyclone” of 1885 when it was smashed by the earthquake of 1886. New Orleans was hit 

by Katrina and also had levees fail at water levels below their assumed failure point. It would be 

diffcult for a community to determine the joint probability of these events.

As was mentioned briefy at the Symposium, an alternative approach might stress “possibility,” not

“probability,” and focus on effects, especially loss of functionality, rather than on single types of 

events.		Thus, a standard for this identifcation process might focus a community on the types of

damage it might suffer (i.e., effects or consequences) rather than the types of events the community 

might experience.

But it is even more important - and diffcult - for a community to develop and implement strategies

to deal with the hazards it faces. Uncertainties in the likelihood of disruptive events inevitably 

collide with the certainties of the problems faced by communities daily - poverty, education, and 

day-to-day crises.		Resilient communities fnd ways to weave resilience- enhancing actions into

the fabric of their daily actions; a standard to help communities do this routinely would be most 

benefcial. CARRI’s Community Resilience System (CRS) has had success in helping communities

to do this; other approaches have been used successfully as well. In this case, a standard for the 

attributes of a successful approach (“to be successful, a community process should have the 

following attributes...”) could be quite useful.		Such a standard likely would refect those common

elements to all approaches that assure success.
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Component standards

Most of the participants seemed to think that setting component standards is straightforward (likely 

true), but the acceptance and implementation of new standards presents a real challenge to NIST. 

Currently, there is a plethora of standards for parts of the built environment. Some are embedded in 

building codes, some are ANSI standards, some are refected in Miami-Dade County test methods,

some in professional codes. Before embarking on development of new component standards, 

NIST would do well to engage with each of the relevant “standard- bearers” to both identify 

gaps as well as the determining the coverage of existing standards. These “standard-bearing” 

organizations would then be involved in flling gaps and assisting in the development and 

implementation of new standards. In some cases, NIST may choose to actually leverage the 

resources of these organizations to develop a new standard that would then be endorsed by NIST.

Deciding whether to focus only on new or to include existing structures is another challenge

in setting standards for “components.” This was only briefy touched on at the Symposium.

Clearly it is more straightforward to develop and apply standards that only apply to new 

construction. However, given the turnover time of our infrastructure (in some cases, we have 

water infrastructure that dates back to the late 1800’s) it is important that this issue is consciously 

decided and documented. NIST might choose to take a two-tier approach – initial standards 

that apply to new construction followed by consideration of standards around the much 

more complicated (and probably contentious) set of issues around existing infrastructure.

Performance standards

A community’s performance requirements for its infrastructure generally refect a functional

perspective, i.e., the members of the community are more concerned about “Continuity of Service,” 

and aren’t particularly concerned about the robustness or resilience of individual assets. Thus, 

performance requirements and standards derived from a community’s needs will refect how long

the community can do without the service.

Consider an electric utility that experiences a disaster. There is an initial loss of capacity, followed 

by a gradual return of service to its customers. In this case, the “new normal” level of service is 

the same as that provided prior to the disaster (electric utilities almost never add new generation 

in response to a disaster). This loss of service will impact its customers: smaller businesses, with 

fewer resources than larger businesses, are more susceptible to a loss of service
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– some small businesses will fail if the outage is extended. Larger businesses with their greater 

resources are less susceptible to loss of power but even they may eventually fail without electricity. 

These business failures caused by a loss-of-service event in turn can cascade into loss of tax revenue 

for local government, a loss of jobs, and an eventual loss of other services. In other words, the 

businesses in community establish a de facto performance requirement for electric power. Health 

care, water services, and every other part of the community – even families – establish performance 

requirements for loss of electrical service in a similar way.

More generally, the same holds true for all of the essential infrastructural services: the ability of 

the rest of the community to tolerate loss of service sets performance requirements for that service. 

In general, these requirements are likely to vary based on the community’s economic and social 

makeup, i.e., there is no reason to expect that a single performance requirement (for example, for 

the system that provides electric power) will be applicable for every community. Thus, in setting 

performance standards, NIST should recognize that communities are interested in perceived

functionality and that consequently there will be a range of expectations of what an adequate 

standard of performance might be.

Hopefully, a NIST Center of Excellence for Community Resilience will help elucidate this 

further. Through simulations, it should be possible to determine whether there is a minimum 

time that seems applicable for all communities (e.g., a performance requirement for an electric 

power system might be that power must be restored within X hours) for a given infrastructural 

service.

Theme: Communities are not defned by jurisdictions. In today’s world, they tend to be more 

regional in character.

Observation:

This statement was reiterated on several occasions during the meeting. Unfortunately, the 

implications for NIST were not mentioned.

• Nearly all of the attempts to develop resilience metrics have revolved around defned

jurisdictions – cities, counties, or states. Further, these metrics are generally based on 

publically available statistical data (e.g., from the Census Bureau) for these defned

jurisdictions. Thus, NIST has few signposts to point them toward metrics for 

regional communities. CARRI’s approach to the development of “metrics” for 

communities on a regional basis is one of the few available. In the assessment process 

in the CRS, a local community (usually a jurisdiction within a regional community) 

identifes its regional linkages and interdependencies.		The community then evaluates
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these ties in terms of their ability to help the community recover from different kinds of 

disruptive events.		Thus, to a large extent, the “metrics” actually refect the involvement

and engagement of regional entities with the local jurisdiction.

•	 It is diffcult to defne the boundaries (e.g., geographic, social, economic) of regional

communities. People living in suburbia, for example, are members of their bedroom 

communities on most nights and weekends. However, their working lives and much of 

their social lives is likely to revolve around their nearby urban area. Further, businesses in 

a regional economic cluster may all rely on a single supplier located several states away. 

If NIST chooses to develop metrics and standards for regional communities it will 

need to consider how to “bound” regional communities. Use of membership functions 

(a la Lotf Zadeh) could be a useful way to surmount this challenge.

• Many regional communities are located in more than one state. This means that regional 

approaches to resilience are likely to be constrained by the welter of regulations around 

insurance, fnance, building codes, and utilities; as well as the many approaches to home

rule. Thus, attempts by regional communities that span more than one state to adopt 

and implement NIST-developed standards may be stymied by differences in state laws 

and regulations.

Theme: While local (or regional) government is usually an important component of a community, 

government can’t make a community more resilient by itself. Each of the signifcant stakeholders 

in the community has to be involved. Engagement of the business sector is especially important 

since the business sector owns a majority of our nation’s infrastructure and buildings and often has 

resources that the public sector does not have.

Observations:

In many ways, local government is at the heart of a community. It is usually the Great Convener 

for the community, gathering people together to identify and solve problems. The leadership of the 

local government is often seen as the leadership of the community. Local government has a role in 

almost every aspect of a community’s life.

However, having a role is not the same as being the sole – or even the main – actor in every specifc

aspect of community life. For example, local government regulates businesses and collects taxes 

and fees from them. But the economic health and resilience of the community generally have 

little to do with the involvement of local government. Government does not own most of the 

buildings in a community; usually does not provide the community’s electricity; may not provide 

the community’s water; and may not even be responsible for upkeep of many of the community’s 

major transportation arteries. In fact, local government often is not the driving force that propels 

the community to greater resilience.
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The reinvention of Charlotte, NC, in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s offers an instructive example. Throughout 

the frst two thirds of the twentieth century, Charlotte’s economic health was intimately tied to

textiles and regional trade. When the textile industry began its slow decline in the ‘60’s, the private 

sector – led by fnancier Hugh McColl and retailer John Belk – spearheaded the transformation of

Charlotte from a regional center of trade to the second largest fnancial center in the country, and

the home of eight Fortune 500 frms.		Local government did play a role (e.g., John Belk eventually

became mayor) but it was the private sector that was the key to the city’s resilience. Thus, in 

developing standards and incentives, NIST should seek to engage all stakeholders, especially 

the business sector.

Theme: Standards and metrics for community resilience should consider a community’s 

fnancial, environmental (both built and natural) and social capital.

Observation:

At the Symposium, there was general agreement that infrastructural resilience involves both 

engineering and non-engineering aspects. However, as Kristen MacAskill and Peter Guthrie state, 

“The reality is that both structural and non-structural approaches have value; the challenge is in 

fnding the right balance.” NIST received little guidance at the Symposium about how to strike that

balance.

In his talk, David Abramson indirectly indicated an important part of striking that balance:		the

resilience of any one part of the community will depend on and/or have an impact on the 

resilience of all of the other parts in some way. Thus, resilience standards and metrics have 

to be embedded in the context of the Whole Community. No part of modern communities 

can be considered an isolated island - all are connected in some way. Abramson pointed out the 

communication diffculties especially communication overload, the unavailability of the work force,

problems with technology and energy, challenges to the water system, poor governance (as opposed 

to government) due to a lack of prior planning, and the challenges faced by those with special 

needs in the aftermath of Sandy. In his talk, Michael Bruno illustrated how an institution of higher 

education can impact the rest of the community.

In striking the balance, NIST should also recognize that the risk management and resilience 

strategies a community employs refect both the community’s resources and its competence 

– its maturity. A simple model of community maturity might envision three community types.

At the lowest level are communities with few resources. These are likely to be focused on simply 

surviving a disruptive event. Their resilience strategies will entail garnering external resources 

as rapidly as possible after an event. These communities would most likely take little action to 

prevent or mitigate disruptions simply because of the lack of resources. With good leadership a 
Appendix C

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community at this lowest level may be able to ascend to a higher level; without it, the community 

is doomed to live poised on a knife’s edge.

Communities at an intermediate level have enough discretionary resources to take signifcant action

to become more resilient. These almost certainly include prevention and mitigation, and sometimes 

include more forward-looking actions (e.g., maintaining a reserve fund; providing the supplies the 

regional transportation system needs in order to accommodate pet owners during an emergency; 

organizing evacuation so that community leaders maintain contact with evacuees no matter where 

they are). In general, these communities are focused on bouncing back from disaster. Almost 

always, the leaders of these communities are competent managers.

There are relatively few communities at the highest level of maturity. They recognize that 

resilience requires investment and have the resources to do so. These communities are not only 

prepared for disruptive events but are actively seeking opportunities to improve themselves; 

i.e., acting as agents of change. The leadership of these communities – including leaders from 

each part of the community – is able to work as a team to improve the entire community. The 

leadership’s overall approach is that “a rising tide lifts all boats;” thus, investment in one part of the 

community is not seen as a zero sum game.

A model that explicitly includes both the structural and non-structural aspects of resilience as 

well as refecting the interdependencies among the various parts of the community is another 

key component in striking the right balance. Hopefully, NIST’s Center of Excellence for 

Community Resilience will provide that sort of model.

An example is the very simple “practitioners’ model” that CARRI has used to guide its work. 

In this model, the community is parsed into “service areas,” each providing a core service to 

the community (e.g., energy; water; health care; fnance; local government).		The focus is on

functionality not individual assets.

For each service area, its response to a negative change occurring at time t=0 is considered to 

follow a loss-recovery curve that can be deconvoluted as follows:

Fi(t) = Fi(0) – Li(t) + wi(t)•Ri(t)

where

Fi(0) is the functional capacity of service area “i” immediately before the negative change occurs, 
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L(t) is the loss of capacity as a function of time, Ri(t) are the resources available to the

community for recovery of service area “i,” and wi(t) is the effciency with which those resources

can be used.

A model such as this has the following advantages in terms of striking the balance.

•	 It explicitly considers each part of the community. Thus, it refects that different parts of

the community may recover from disruption at different rates and to different levels, i.e., 

one part of the community may be more or less resilient than other parts.

• For the infrastructural service areas, it includes both structural and non-structural 

components in a fairly natural way. For these service areas, the loss function, Li(t) 

refects the structural robustness of the system.		The resources available for recovery of

functionality, and the effciency with which those resources can be used refect the nonstructural “strength” of the service area.

• Explicit inclusion of time is useful in pointing that a community will gain new resources 

over time and potentially learn to use them better.

•	 The effciency function includes prior planning, leadership and connectivity refecting the

social capital for each service area, while Ri(t) refects the fnancial and human resources

available for recovery.

• It also leads to a natural differentiation among the types of strategies that a community may 

follow to enhance its resilience. The community may choose to boost its initial capacity in 

order to have redundant resources (increase Fi(0)); it may choose to make its infrastructure 

more resistant to disruption (reduce Li(t)); it may choose to increase the resources available 

for recovery (increase Ri(t)); or it may choose to increase its ability to use the resources 

available to it (increase wi(t)).

This is not to recommend that NIST use this model, but to point out that a model that explicitly 

includes both structural and non-structural factors will be quite useful to NIST in striking the 

needed balance. As George Box famously said, “All models are wrong; some are useful.”

Theme: Acceptance of standards and metrics for either community resilience or infrastructure 

and buildings requires engagement of all of the stakeholders who will use the standards in any 

way.

Observation:

As the preceding section indicates, it is highly unlikely that NIST can develop a single set of 

standards or metrics that will be applicable across all sectors.		Different sectors are regulated in

different ways. Ownership of assets varies widely across sectors – even within a single sector. 

For some types of infrastructure, “standards” effectively already exist (e.g., Miami-Dade County
Appendix C

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testing protocols are de facto standards aimed at minimizing the damage due to hurricanes). Thus, 

the thrust of this theme is that NIST should consider developing standards on a sector- bysector basis. In each sector, NIST should fnd ways to engage the “user” community – those 

who will be expected to be a part of either using or enforcing the standards.

Theme: Metrics are necessary to provide a “baseline” understanding of a community’s 

resilience, and to indicate the community’s evolving maturity in terms of resilience.

Observation:

This statement was reiterated on several occasions during the meeting. Unfortunately, NIST 

received little guidance about how to develop metrics. NIST will face several challenges in 

developing resilience metrics (in addition to those already mentioned):

• A community’s resilience is revealed through its response to and recovery from a 

disruption. In this sense, we can only be certain about a community’s resilience after we 

see it come through a storm. This implies that resilience is displayed through the actions 

taken by the community.

• A community’s resilience depends on the type of disruption, the magnitude of the disruption, 

how the community is structured and how it behaves. Carpenter and Walker a decade ago 

made a similar point.		A natural disaster’s frst points of attack are the physical parts of a

community; a recession frst attacks a community’s economic infrastructure; a pandemic’s

initial point of attack is the people who live in the community.		Different communities

have taken different paths toward recovery from the same event – but have still recovered 

from Katrina or, later, Sandy. Gulf Coast communities impacted by both Katrina and the 

BP oil spill followed very different paths in recovering from the oil spill than they took in 

recovering from Hurricane Katrina.

• Vulnerability is not always the opposite of resilience. It is well recognized that resilience 

has many defnitions, but a common thread is action – bouncing back or at least adapting

to adversity. Vulnerability may indicate susceptibility to a type of disruptive event – for 

example, coastal communities are susceptible to hurricanes. Two coastal communities may 

be equally vulnerable and yet one may be much more resilient than the other. Conversely, a 

poor community is generally more vulnerable than a rich one; in this case, vulnerability is a 

(negative) indicator of resilience. Or, to put it another way, resilience is a manifestation of 

strength; resilience metrics need to focus on a community’s strengths and weaknesses (those 

areas where it lacks the strength necessary for recovery).

CARRI has found that providing answers to the following questions enhances the likelihood that 

the metrics will in fact be useful and used by a community.

What is the purpose of the metric, i.e., how will it be used? 
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Who will use the metrics?

Who will collect the data?

In what domains will data be collected? 

How will data be collected?

When and how frequently should data be collected? 

Is the validity of the metric established?

NIST should consider developing specifc answers to each of these questions as the frst 

step in metrics development.

Theme: Incentives can play a major role in speeding the adoption of resilience standards, 

as can the elimination of barriers. Incentives may include innovations in project fnance, in 

insurance or a smart restructuring of regulatory regimes.

Observation:

These discussions were among the most spirited in the Symposium. The importance of 

innovation was stressed. For example, Laura Coyne’s presentation on the use of catastrophic 

bonds by the MTA pointed out the value of non-traditional fnancing schemes.		Mark Freeman,

of Loughborough University (UK), briefy discussed a British program that allowed certain types

of resilience-building projects to use a more favorable discount rate in order to secure project 

funding.		This could be especially useful for energy effciency projects in the US because it could

increase the projected return-on-investment or decrease the payback period, thus, broadening the 

number and type of projects that to be considered.

Steve Flynn suggested changing the Stafford Act so that the community share of the funds needed 

to recover from a disaster would greatly increase. The rationale is along the lines that if the federal 

government is paying the lion’s share of the costs of disaster, communities have little incentive 

to take actions to increase their resilience. If communities have to pay more of the costs, they 

will take action so costs go down. This argument is similar to one often made about the costs of 

health care – if patients have to pay more of the bill, they will be better consumers and costs will 

decrease. But health care costs continue their inexorable climb – it is not clear why the costs of 

disasters would behave differently.

It probably would be more useful to identify the various components of the costs of disasters 

and seek ways to reduce each of them. For example, debris management from Hurricane 

Katrina costs accounted for about fve per cent of the total funds provided by the federal

government to the affected states. The cost would be the same no matter who paid the bill.
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However, if regulatory barriers could be overcome (e.g., pre-approval of waivers for disposition of 

certain types of wastes) then costs would be reduced. While NIST is unlikely to be in a position 

to provide incentives, it could help to reduce the costs of disasters by working with other 

agencies (Corps of Engineers, FEMA, EPA) to develop innovative practices to reduce the 

costs of demolition, debris removal and other aspects of dealing with disasters.

At the Symposium, there was also some discussion of resilience enablers. As noted above, 

modern communities are more regional in character than they used to be. States could 

effectively incentivize greater resilience if they encouraged the formation of regional 

coalitions. These can take many forms: regional technology clusters, encouragement of regional 

councils of government, or formulation of economic development strategies on a regional rather 

than a community basis. In this regard, Governor Cuomo’s creation of Regional Economic 

Development Councils in New York, and provision of funding for each to forge a regional longterm economic development strategy, should prove to be a notable resilience enabler.

Theme: There is a need for a Global Research Network focused on resilience.

Observation:

After the Symposium was completed, more than 30 of the participants met to discuss formation 

of a Global Research Network (GRN) focused on community or societal resilience. There was 

agreement on the need to form such a group and by the attendees to participate in a GRN. There 

seemed to be a consensus that the Network could expedite the research and development needed 

to achieve greater resilience. However, there have been similar meetings held in the past that have 

had little lasting success.

In order to be successful, the organizers of the GRN should consider the following:

• The Network needs a home – some organization has to take ownership and responsibility 

for nurturing the GRN. Things like setting up listserv’s and other communication channels, 

providing regular updates on progress, ensuring verbal commitments are commitments to 

act together, and other low-level tasks are “easy” but the sheer volume of work that needs 

to be done is daunting. Also, funding is required to make this happen. The founders should 

consider grafting the GRN onto an existing effort such as ANDROID (the EU-supported

Academic Network for Disaster Resilience to Optimise educatIonal Development).

• The GRN needs an accomplishment – something tangible that shows that the members 

working together can provide value. Examples might include

o Building a path out of the quagmire of defning resilience.		This could be done by

identifying the characteristics of a resilient community (Meir Elran has provided 

a start on this.) or by developing a taxonomy of defnitions that clearly delineates
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their applicability (MacAskill and Guthrie at the University Cambridge have an 

interesting take on this in a forthcoming paper.).

o Developing a “maturity scale” for communities in terms of their resilience.

o Establishing a database of successful practices for communities to use to enhance

their resilience.

• The Network needs a charter – a statement of what it intends to accomplish and how it 

will function.

CONCLUSION

Important themes developed in the far-ranging discussions at the Symposium have been 

summarized above. The possible implications of these and challenges they pose for NIST have 

been identifed as well as suggestions that NIST may wish to consider.		A few of these bear

repeating.

• In developing standards and standardized metrics, NIST should engage early and often with 

the “user communities” – those who will use the standards or metrics, those who will collect 

the data for metrics, and those who will enforce standards. This of necessity includes both 

private and public entities.

• Perhaps the biggest challenge facing NIST is striking the balance between “structural”

and “non-structural” (social, economic, environmental) factors.

• In crafting metrics and standards around community resilience, NIST must recognize the 

diversity among communities, and the variety of approaches different communities may take 

to resolve similar problems. Governance is a key part of this, particularly when considering 

regional communities.

• NIST should carefully consider whether standards it develops apply only to new 

construction.

NIST is to be commended for reaching as broadly as it has as it takes on these diffcult

challenges. This proactive approach bodes well for a successful outcome.
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C.3: Reflections on Enhancing Community and Infrastr ucture 

Resilience, Tom Wilbanks, Senior Corporate Fellow, Oak Ridge 

National Laboratory

REFLECTIONS ON ENHANCING COMMUNITY AND 

INFRASTRUCTURE RESILIENCE

Thomas J. Wilbanks

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Refections on Themes, Findings, and Recommendations Resulting from the 

International Resilience Symposium, organized by the Northeastern University 

Center for Resilience Studies and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, 

September 3-4, 2014

September 2014

REFLECTIONS ON ENHANCING COMMUNITY AND INFRASTRUCTURE 

RESILIENCE
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I. Introduction

Organized and sponsored by Northeastern University’s Center for Resilience Studies and 

the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), with logistical assistance from the 

Meridian Institute, an International Resilience Symposium was held at NIST on September 3-4, 

2014, to bring together a diverse group of professionals from the US and other countries to 

share their thoughts about (a) the development of standards for community and infrastructure/

buildings resilience and (b) ways that incentives might be developed to catalyze investments in 

enhancing resilience. The symposium was actively and vigorously led by Steve Flynn, Director 

of the Northeastern center and a national leader in discussions of resilience needs and options.

The Symposium was one of a number of recent initiatives to try to improve the understanding of 

the powerful concept of “resilience,” to try to move the concept toward operational metrics and 

strategies that would promote actual improvements in community and infrastructure resilience, 

and to broaden the community of researchers and practitioners involved in these processes. 

As the discussion at the Symposium noted repeatedly, nobody is opposed to resilience; but, if 

so, why does progress toward realizing it seem to be so slow? If resilience is fundamentally a 

matter of existing and even thriving in a world pervaded by risks and surprises – which sounds 

both necessary and attractive – what can we do to make this a part of our national culture at 

all scales: from national and regional to local and even individual, family, and neighborhood 

attitudes and values? 

II. Revisiting the ”Resilience” Concept

“Resilience” has emerged in recent years as a term that captures what we seek in 

risk management for the human systems, built infrastructures, and environments that 

we value. It is more proactive than “vulnerability,” which refers to threats rather than 

responses; or “adaptation,” which tends to imply reactive coping with threats; or 

“emergency preparedness,” which tends to imply readiness for disruptions rather than a 

reduction in the efects of disruptions. In fact, it includes all of these narrower concepts 

in a defnition that looks forward not only to risk reduction but to sustained economic, 

social, and environmental development in the face of continuing risks from a variety of 

possible driving forces: 

But if resilience is going to be a powerful force for action, it needs to be capable of 

evaluation. Is a particular community or infrastructure X more or less resilient than Y? 

Is it becoming more or less resilient through time? What might be the payofs from a 

proposed investment in enhancing its resilience? This has led to a growing demand for 

resilience “metrics” that can be used for purposes ranging from (a) defning baseline 

conditions within a system and monitoring changes through time to (b) making decisions 

about the allocation of management and fnancial resources to promote resilience.

Eforts to respond to this demand have found the process to be frustratingly difcult. For 

example, “resilience” is relative: for what? for whom? why? who decides? Developing 

a metric is more tractable if the focus is relatively narrow, but the reality is that resilience 
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is deeply imbedded in interdependencies between systems and scales. Narrowness 

misses the point. In addition, a metric has the most meaning if it is developed through 

bottom-up participation by community and infrastructure stakeholders, who tend to have 

a range of goals and perspectives; but such bottom-up processes result in metrics that 

are often difcult to compare between communities and infrastructures. 

In introductory remarks at the symposium, [name redacted] suggested several reasons why 

progress has been so slow, aside from the difculty of measuring resilience: (a) groups and 

individuals exposed to risks are too poorly informed about those risks: (b) most groups 

and individuals are too confdent that risks will be managed by current capabilities, or at 

least by parties other than themselves; (c) talking about risks without practical ways to 

address them is uncomfortable for decision-makers; (d) incentives are lacking for actions 

to increase resilience; and (e) organizational structures are lacking for addressing systemic 

and scale interdependencies. Contributing to the fuzziness of the resilience concept has 

been its relatively independent use across communities of research and practice that are 

not well-connected with each other (e.g., communities, built infrastructures, and emergency 

preparedness) and its overlaps with related concepts such as adaptation and sustainability – 

problems that the symposium was, in part, organized to address.

A particular challenge is that resilience concerns are often focused not only on multiple threats 

but on possible exposures to episodic low-probability/high-consequence disruptions from 

such growing threats as climate change. Allocating signifcant resources to deal with possible 

threats in the future whose likelihood is surrounded by uncertainty, when there are many other 

competing needs for such resources in the present, is often a difcult decision – which can 

imply a need to associate actions that improve resilience to future threats with other kinds 

of payofs from those actions in the more immediate future. An additional requirement is to 

increase the recognition of decision-makers and stakeholders that the future is very likely to 

contain diferent and possibly more surprises for communities and infrastructures than the past 

– combined with a likelihood that roles of government in coping with such stresses are likely to 

be constrained by budget limitations and other competing priorities, while governmental leaders 

are virtually certain to be a focus of criticism if those surprises are unpleasant. A very daunting 

predicament, where good ideas might be especially welcome. 

Other challenges include:

(1) The fact that resilience actions are rooted in the sustainability of social processes 

that shape driving forces and implementation. Resilience actions in the absence of a 

supportive social context are likely themselves not to be sustainable.

(2) The fact that, in some cases, threats may be so large in magnitude that resilience can 

only be achieved through transformational change – signifcant changes in the nature, 

scale, and/or location of systems, facilities, and activities – which is a bigger challenge 

for decision-making and implementation than incremental change.

On the other hand, if resilience truly reduces risks for communities and/or infrastructures, then 

elements of society who value risk reduction (such as insurance and fnancial institutions, and 

social organizations who care about human well-being) should be prepared to reward it. A 

further challenge is to get to the point where resilience metrics are persuasive enough to 
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“mainstream” such incentives, with broad social, market, and policy support.

III. Perspectives on Community Resilience

Community resilience has been a particular concern, following the experience with Gulf Coast 

hurricanes in 2005 and 2007 and with Northeastern storms such as Irene in 2011 and Sandy in 

2012. It was a focus of the Community and Regional Resilience Insitute (CARRI) from 2007 to 

2011, including a very efective Community Leaders Working Group; and it is the current focus 

of the NAS/NRC Roundtable on Risk, Resilience, and Extreme Events. 

The fundamental reality is that communities are highly resistant to well-intentioned eforts by 

academics and others to develop quantitative metrics that might be connected with resilience 

standards or certifcation, based on available data on physical conditions and/or community 

well-being. In virtually every case, they believe that each community is in important respects 

unique in its threats, its needs, its ways of confronting challenges, and its relationships with 

state, regional, and national institutions the public private, and voluntary sectors. They tend 

to be less concerned about external fnancial rewards for resilience improvements and more 

concerned about how resilience makes their own communities healthier and better.

The tradition in seeking measures of community resilience has been to look for measures of 

community well-being, such as the number of hospital beds per capita, and/or of physical 

conditions, such as available evacuation routes. It has been especially attractive to try to 

populate metrics with variables based on county-level census data (e.g., Cutter). Many topdown approaches have been developed, generally aimed at critical community infrastructures; 

and there are a few bottom-up approaches as well, such as a NOAA coastal community 

resilience index (scorecard-based) and the Communities Advancing Resilience Toolkit (CART) 

(see NAS/NRC, Disaster Resilience, 2012).

But one insight from the CARRI experience has been that, to community leaders, resilience is 

a social process, not a set of physical conditions. It is rooted in capabilities in a community 

to come together in a time of crisis and transcend typical barriers between public and private 

sector, city-wide structures and neighborhoods, rich and poor. One can imagine a set of 

dimensions of “social capital” that would capture this perspective, e.g., (a) social engagement, 

connectivity, and inclusiveness, measured for instance by the extent and diversity of 

participation in community activities; (b) community resourcefulness: its capacity for collective 

action as one community vs. competing interests; and (c) community resources for coping 

with threats and disruptions. The problem is that it is very difcult to fnd measures of these 

kinds of community dimensions in sets of social indicators that have developed for all or most 

communities. A few pioneering eforts have been made, such as RAND, 2011, and Norris, 2008; 

but there is no consensus on a workable approach that would not require new data development 

for US communities.

As indicated earlier, perhaps the most fundamental issue for metrics, standards, or 

certifcation approaches for evaluating the resilience of communities is that comparisons 

across communities imply that “one size fts all” for community resilience, which only makes 

sense for certain specifc purposes. Two issues are often worth considering in developing 

metrics: (1) What is the metric for? Who would use it and for what? Is the proposed metric 

and the information to support it credible to the user (e.g., an insurer of public infrastructure 

in a community)? (2) Even where a single metric for the resilience of many communities is not 
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achievable, can metrics be developed for selected determinants of community resilience as an 

indicator of status, progress, and needs for at least those driving forces?

IV. Perspectives on Infrastructure Resilience

Many of the participants in the symposium expected that developing standards for infrastructure 

resilience would be far easier than for communities – tending to refect engineering judgments 

about sensitivities of built structures to risks of disruptions rather than the social complexities of 

communities. In fact, however, the discussion was far more nuanced than this, connecting with 

a wider variety of knowledge and experience.

The starting point was a strong consensus on three issues, that: 

(1) infrastructure resilience to particular risks and threats is related to overall infrastructure 

health, and we have too limited a capacity to assess infrastructure health; 

(2) actions to increase infrastructure resilience should start by identifying the desired outcome – 

more clearly than “increased resilience.” What are the performance goals? Metrics can be of a 

number of diferent types. For example, an NAS/NRC report on the appropriate use of metrics 

for the Climate Change Science Program (Thinking Strategically, 2005) listed fve types: 

- process metrics (measuring a course of action) 

- input metrics (measuring tangible quantities inserted in a process to achieve a goal) 

- output metrics (measuring products or services delivered) 

- outcome metrics (measuring results)

- impact metrics (measuring longer-term consequences)

(3) the resilience of particular infrastructures in particular places is powerfully linked to 

interconnections between infrastructures, places, and systems: e.g., engineered vs. operational 

vs. policy; and between diferent kinds of infrastructures, such as energy, communication, and 

transportation; and between urban areas and the regions around them – when responsibilities 

for infrastructure resilience are typically very fragmented. 

Avenues for progress begin with building on existing “mainstreamed” processes and practices. 

Examples include normal infrastructure replacement and revitalization cycles (although they 

are proving to be very slow for public sector infrastructures in this country) and existing 

codes and standards for buildings and other built infrastructures. Incorporating resilience/

adaptation/sustainability in normal infrastructure planning can reduce its incremental cost and 

simplify decision processes; and codes and standards can often be updated by the engineering 

community to refect new knowledge, as the American Society for Civil Engineering (ASCE) is 

currently doing for climate change adaptation. One danger that has been noted in the research 

literature is a “levee efect,” where awareness of a risk to society and/or infrastructure managers 

is addressed by a specifc action (e.g., building a levee to protect against river fooding), after 

which stakeholders stop worrying about the risk because it has been taken care of – when other 

factors shaping the risk continue to be threats.
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But symposium participants also made the point that codes and standards do not change 

behavior and deliver resilience unless they are understood and supported by a broad 

range of stakeholders. Engineering actions are determined by people, implemented by 

institutions, and sustained by social consensus. If signifcant improvements in the resilience 

of US infrastructures are to be made, there is a need for far better – and far more broadly 

communicated – information about the current status and vulnerabilities of infrastructures, 

especially in the public sector and in private-sector infrastructures whose reliability afects 

public sector infrastructure. Specifcally, this includes changes in current and future conditions 

and driving forces compared with familiar history, in order to generate support for practices that 

build resilience. There are almost certainly potentials to make better use of available data sets 

in this regard (as the 2014 National Climate Assessment has done) and to increase emphasis on 

the co-production of data and information, top-down and bottom-up, by interested parties at a 

variety of scales and roles in society.

At the same time, there are potentials to apply science and technology to make the job easier. 

For example, if metrics can be developed for at least selected aspects of resilience – if not 

for resilience as a whole – then sensors and control systems can be developed for monitoring 

infrastructure performance and responding to emerging threats. Moreover, there are many 

other possible opportunities for S&T innovation, such as innovative construction approaches 

that might lead to structures that are more adaptable to changing conditions. Attention to such 

S&T potentials is not an alternative to attention to social contexts; the two components of longterm infrastructure resilience can in fact work together and reinforce each other.

V. Perspectives on Mechanisms for Improving Resilience

One of the stated objectives of the symposium was to illuminate the challenge of encouraging 

incentives for investment of fnancial resources in community and infrastructure resilience. 

Again, the message from the symposium was that this is more multi-dimensional than simply 

assessing resilience as a strategy for risk reduction and then using those assessments to 

catalyze fnancial investment. The broader issue is mechanisms for improving resilience, which 

can include other approaches than catalyzing fnancial investments alone.

Two realities cut across any discussion of such mechanisms. One is that many infrastructures 

and communities are already stressed by a multitude of driving forces and changes for which 

no immediate coping mechanism appears to exist. Resilience can be seen as just one more 

requirement added to a very large pile, or resilience can help to draw attention to actions that 

help to reduce vulnerabilities to a number of concerns. The second is that responsibilities for 

improving resilience to such stresses are so fragmented – in terms of knowledge development, 

strategy development, and action implementation – that resilience is nobody’s job. Is anybody 

responsible for the big picture, with all of its interconnections?

In many ways, the issue is how to combine public sector and private sector mechanisms – and 

to use them to complement and reinforce each other. On the public sector side, the reality 

is that many critical infrastructures are the responsibility of local and other governments, 

while infrastructure replacement or revitalization is often very expensive in an era when local 

and state governments are expected to keep budgets balanced and, above all, avoid tax 

increases. Resilience may be something that we support in principle, but a local or state 

elected ofcial who raises taxes to assure it is unlikely to stay in ofce. The challenge is fnding 
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innovative ways to overcome this very signifcant obstacle for progress by the public sector (see 

Philadelphia’s “Green City, Clean Waters” program as a conspicuous example).

On the private sector side, the issues are the value proposition and business continuity. What is 

the bottom-line payof from investments in this aspect of risk management, when it is only one 

of a number of risks? In this regard, resilience as a priority is shaped by policy environments, 

societal values, and co-benefts, related to normal elements of risk management – such as 

normal cycles of infrastructure replacement and revitalization, where new risk factors can be 

introduced relatively easily. Insurance costs and conditions for risk-averse fnancing are an 

important part of this process, but they are seldom the dominant part of it. Related to but not 

quite the same as valuing payofs from private sector investment in resilience, i.e., in proft 

margins or market shares, is assuring business continuity – reducing the risks of interruptions in 

sales and services due to disruptive surprises, a strong motivation indeed. 

The challenge is to determine how to put the two sets of responsibilities and mechanisms into 

an integrated pattern of response that meets national, regional, and local needs. One step is 

to distinguish which responsibilities belong in which sector – for instance, federal and state 

agency program activities the responsibility of the public sector, while operating strategies of 

individual private sector frms are the responsibility of the private sector. A second step is to 

determine which functions a sector performs best – working in partnership, with each partner 

avoiding trying to do everything. For instance, the public sector is well-suited to be responsible 

for providing open-access data, while the private sector is well-suited for assuring economic 

efciency. A third step is to take a careful look at linkages, such as contracting activities or 

grant programs of agencies. As is being done by some federal agencies for climate change 

adaptation (e.g., EPA), incorporating resilience in a proposed activity could be made a condition 

for a grant to a community. Another possibility could be to reward resilience by increasing 

regulatory fexibility for an infrastructure or community.

 In either case, unless leadership is unusually efective in making new things happen, the best 

starting point is often to graft changes in incentives onto existing processes and practices, 

emphasizing three aspects of revised practices or standards: non-stationarity – revising current 

practices to refect recent changes in driving forces; fexibility – providing incentives to establish 

frameworks for resource allocation and action that encourage and enable appropriate and 

creative adaptations to a wide variety of possible circumstances; and a focus on performance 

rather than prescriptive compliance, a diferent criterion for evaluating compliance with 

standards.

Several useful ideas have been suggested: (1) focus more attention on the costs of a lack of 

infrastructure resilience – and who sufers as a result; (2) phasing in improved codes, standards, 

and other practices that have community support – and then monitoring results so that fnetuning can be considered, with future fne-tuning a part of the “social contract”; (3) seeking to 

identify promising innovations arising from bottom-up problem-solving, especially innovative 

approaches for overcoming a lack of public sector funding for infrastructure improvement (e.g., 

from structures such as the White House Local, State, and Tribal Leaders Task Force); and (4) 

developing ideas about desirable changes in policies and practice that can be proposed in a 

future post-disaster response.

VI. Thoughts About a Way Forward
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Where do we go now? A number of contributors to the symposium, from Steve Flynn to [name 

redacted], ofered useful suggestions as place to start. The issues are (1) what do we need to 

try to do? And (2) how do we move in those directions?

a. The frst issue is focusing on a limited number of objectives. Ideas worth considering 

seriously include: 

Raise awareness of risks and interdependencies. 

Obviously, this is often easier said than done, but leadership can be supported by signals 

from the insurance industry to make it difcult to ignore the importance of integrated risk 

management. In addition, the potential for social media to support informal communications 

should not be ignored – which might call for reaching out to a younger age cohort for assistance 

(!).

Encourage a sense of shared responsibility.

This is also easier said than done, but leadership can be supported by institutions whose 

potential roles are often overlooked. Examples include educational institutions from universities 

to local schools at all scales, including adult education and vocational training but also 

potentials for knowledge and viewpoints of students to enrich family decisions and increase 

societal support for resilience in the longer run. In addition, roles of environmental and social 

non-governmental organizations (NGOs) could contribute, related to the value of resilience for 

sustainability, as well as the support of faith-based organizations.

Emphasize enhancements of currently mainstreamed processes and practices.

As mentioned above, it is usually easier to tweak an existing process than to create a new 

one; and many aspects of strategic planning by communities and infrastructures, along with 

operational rules and guidelines, can be revisited by responsible leaders and stakeholders to 

see if changes can be introduced that would be broadly acceptable and perhaps even ofer 

benefts beyond increased resilience alone.

Align resilience with efforts concerned with sustainability and climate change adaptation. 

Climate change preparedness and adaptation are increasingly recognized as essential, now that 

climate change impacts have been shown to be real; and sustainability is a growing concern 

on the part of a host of institutions and leaders concerned about interactions between society 

and nature. These movements have some momentum, active proponents, and supportive 

institutional structures; and in nearly every case their agendas have strong overlaps with 

resilience as an objective. Increasing the capacity to bundle these naturally aligned forces in 

support of efective policies and action that have multiple benefts could add to the prospects of 

them all.

b. The second issue is how to make progress toward achieving these objectives. Possibilities 

include:

Mechanisms for raising awareness and encouraging a sense of responsibility:

Broad-based contingency planning and exercises. 

Participative contingency planning is a powerful tool for encouraging a variety of stakeholders 
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and parties at interest to consider implications of possible futures that are not normally on their 

personal radar screens. Probabilities matter less than possibilities, and impacts and actions 

can be considered and discussed without necessarily calling for immediate action. Bodies 

of practice and knowledge exist for aspects of this approach from participatory scenario 

development to consideration of “shock” disruptions. Meanwhile, such communities as 

emergency preparedness and national defense frequently conduct exercises that include role 

playing in responding to hypothetical threats. This is a familiar mechanism for “converting the 

unimaginable into the imaginable” in encouraging responsibilities for resilience.

Using focal events as opportunities. 

We all know that focal events such as terrorist events, extreme weather events, and pandemics 

“open policy windows” for actions that would be difcult to catalyze and implement in normal 

times. Having good ideas, fully vetted and supported, ready to go in the unfortunate event 

that a disruptive focal event occurs can move resilience along in ways that ofer wide-ranging 

benefts in the longer run.

Public recognition of resilience achievements. 

One of the most powerful mechanisms for encouraging resilience, and one of the easiest and 

least expensive to implement, is to ofer widely-publicized high-level awards to individuals who 

show notable leadership and to community and infrastructure activities that have led to notable 

achievements in resilience improvement. Presidential awards announced each year?

Visualization as a key to awareness.

An item that may sound rather mundane is the underestimated power of visualization as a way 

to promote resilience awareness. Such possibilities as short videos showing changes in maps 

or communities under diferent threats and possible futures can support contingency planning, 

resilience education, and outreach through the media in publicizing risks and rewards from 

risk reduction; and introducing resilience as a theme in certain kinds of computer games can 

reach additional audiences. How about a “resilience visualization laboratory,” analogous to the 

Decision Theater at the Arizona State University, developed with support from NSF’s program on 

decision-making under uncertainty? 

Immediately accessible mechanisms for making progress while awareness is being 

raised:

Attention to normal processes of infrastructure revitalization and community planning, including 

attention to revisions in existing codes and standards.

Described above.

Developing taxonomies of determinants of resilience and focusing on those niches a few at a 

time.

Even if developing metrics for community or infrastructure resilience as a single variable is 

not generally possible at the present time, it is possible to imagine developing taxonomies or 

matrices of the major determinants of resilience and to start to populate the taxonomy with 

metrics for several of the determinants at a time, moving toward comprehensive coverage of 

major pieces of the resilience puzzle in the longer run.
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Government as a consumer in the resilience marketplace.

Finally, government does not have to wait until it raises awareness and catalyzes investments 

across all of society in order to make progress. As has been done with issues from 

environmental protection, equipment energy efciency, and climate change adaptation, 

government can start by establishing standards and practices for itself. Signifcant 

improvements can result, awareness can be raised, and markets for resilience products, 

services, and expertise can be created. In many cases, this can be carried out by Presidential 

Directive without requiring Congressional action. It can be a very real place to start.

VII. Conclusion

In some ways, the International Resilience Symposium might be considered a failure. It 

did not succeed in developing standards for community and/or infrastructure resilience, 

and it did not succeed in developing incentives for catalyzing fnancial investments in 

resilience. But its ambitious agenda led to a discourse that will be more sustainable 

in the longer term, because it recognizes and identifes the main challenges in moving 

toward a feasible agenda for resilience action. Rather than providing answers for now, it 

points toward some very realistic steps that can be taken now – signifcantly improving 

prospects for resilience over the next several decades.
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C.4: Resilience to natural disasters: the role of standards,

Tim Davies, Department of Geological Sciences, University of 

Canterbury, New Zealand

Resilience to natural disasters: the 

role of standards

Tim Davies, Department of Geological Sciences, University of Canterbury, New Zealand tm.

davies@canterbury.ac.nz

Abstract

The role of standards in societal and infrastructure resilience was the subject of a 2-day meetng at NIST in 

Gaithersburg, USA in September 2014. The discussions at that meetng were exceptonally wide-ranging, 

and the breadth of perspectves present indicated a need for a ratonal conceptual basis for the broad concept 

of resilience. This paper atempts to provide such a basis by suggestng that the strict usage of the term 

‘resilience’ be focused on approaches to reducing the impacts on society from unknown, unexpected and/

or unquantfed events, while known, expected and adequately quantfed events are dealt with by risk 

management. While risk management can legitmately be considered to be a component of resilience, it is 

useful from an operatonal point of view to separate them. Study of the probabilistc basis of risk management 

emphasizes the limits of its reliable applicaton, which are to frequent minor events only. Reducing the 

impacts of less frequent and larger events requires a diferent approach, related to the degree to which these 

events are inadequately quantfed or unexpected. Complex dynamic system behaviour is suggested as a 

useful descriptor of the processes, in both natural and human systems, that give rise to disasters, and it is 

hypothesised that the behavioural characteristcs of complex dynamic systems may indicate societal behaviours 

that are intrinsically resilient. Recognising the increasing divergence of societal behaviour from complex 

dynamic system behaviour suggests ways in which society may be able to increase its intrinsic resilience, 

e.g. by increasing decentralisaton, diversity and redundancy. The use of disaster scenarios to complement 

or replace probabilistc data can be efectve in informing a community about ways in which it can become 

resilient.

Introducton

The potental for natural events such as earthquakes, foods and tornadoes to detrimentally afect society 

leads to their identfcaton as hazards. The occurrence of these hazard events results from the behaviour of the 

natural systems that generate them; earthquakes result from plate tectonic motons, foods from the way in 

which rainfall afects river fows, and tornadoes from the complex fuid dynamics of atmospheric convecton. 

These natural systems are known to behave as a ‘complex dynamic systems’, and in fact this behaviour is also 

recognised in the societal systems impacted by the natural events (Sornete, 2002). Thus the occurrence of 

natural disasters – the impacts of major natural events on society – can be described as the interacton of two 

sets of complex dynamic systems. A great deal is known about complex system behaviour (e.g. De Toni and 

Cornella, 2011), and we show later that this knowledge may have the potental to form a sound conceptual 

basis for beter understanding natural disasters, and for devising ways to reduce their efects.
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Traditonally, disaster reducton has been approached by atemptng to understand and quantfy the natural 

behaviour that causes the event. When engineers ruled the world this resulted in atempts to alter the natural 

system behaviour so that society was less afected – for example, altering river behaviour by building levees to 

prevent the river from re-occupying a part of its bed that was now occupied instead by societal developments. 

Such eforts stll contnue, but are increasingly realised to be at best short-term and very expensive ways of 

delaying and exacerbatng future disasters (Davies and McSaveney, 2005; Criss and Shock, 2001). A less 

confrontatonal approach has developed more recently as Risk Management, in which the quantfed event 

data are used to develop event magnitude-frequency curves; these then form the basis of cost-beneft 

analyses which allow optmal solutons to be found among a range of mitgaton strategies (which stll include 

event modifcaton). Risk management is the dominant current paradigm for disaster reducton, and forms the 

basis of the ongoing global push for Disaster Risk Reducton (“DRR”; UNISDR, 2005, 2015). As shown herein, 

however, this approach is intrinsically unreliable when planning for disaster reducton in a planning tmeframe that is reasonable by human standards, because probabilistc predictons are then being made about 

very small numbers of events.

Another concept for reducing the efects of future disasters is that of ‘resilience’. Though variously defned 

and widely critcised, this has the value of being conceptually useful, in that a family, community or society 

that is resilient is commonly seen to be able to deal beter with a future disaster than one which is not. 

Resilience is ofen assumed to be inclusive of, and able to be developed from, risk management; however 

the later assumpton has been sharply critcised by Park et al (2013), on the basis that many of the hazards 

that threaten society are poorly-quantfed or even unknown, and thus are not amenable to risk management 

analyses.

In this context it is useful to think of the threats to society as being at three levels: those encountered as a 

mater of routne (e.g. daily afernoon thunderstorms, car tyre punctures), those that are non- routne but 

expected (e.g. minor car accidents, 5-year foods), and those that are extreme and thus unexpected (e.g. the 

Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the current California drought). Events in the frst two of these categories 

are apparently amenable to risk management procedures, being expected and quantfable, but as will be 

seen later only the routne events occur sufciently frequently in a realistc planning tme-frame to be reliably 

predicted by probability in a specifc locaton or for a specifc community. The third category evidently cannot 

be approached by risk management, being poorly- or unquantfed, or even unknown.

The basis of the present discussion is to associate the requirement for resilience with the second and third 

categories of threat; and it seems very likely that a community that can cope with an extreme event will 

much more easily cope with an expected one. Thus the characteristcs of a resilient community are those 

that enable the community to cope with and redevelop from unexpected shocks without catastrophic loss of 

functonality. It is assumed that threats of the frst (“routne”) category can be dealt with by risk management 

procedures. In the context of standards, the frst category ofers no difcultes other than those of defning 

and enforcing a specifc level of performance; the other categories, however, are less easy to visualise as 

standards, and we address this following further development of the resilience concept.

To set the stage for developing strategies to increase resilience, we frst outline the limitatons of 

probabilistc analysis for reducing the impacts of events that occur only a few tmes in a realistc planning 

tme-frame, and proceed to illustrate how cost-beneft analyses are partcularly sensitve to even minor data 

imprecisions. Following this is an outline of the concept of unexpectedness, and the ways in which even 

known events can become unexpected; this also emphasises how progress in science can reduce the 

range of unexpected and currently unforeseeable events. Then we take a deeper look at the behaviour of 

complex dynamic systems, and how that might provide some insights into behaviours that might allow society 

to become more resilient, before discussing how event and impact scenarios can provide crucial informaton 

for developing and increasing resilience.
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Limitatons of probabilistc risk management

Even if we assume the availability of perfect data to defne the statstcs of past events, and with perfect 

confdence that future probabilites will be identcal to past statstcs, using these probabilites to design 

strategies for managing future catastrophic events remains fundamentally problematc. This is because any 

risk management process, and therefore any probability, is in reality applied only to a specifc future tmeframe defned by human interests, and, in the context of hazard events, this tme- frame is inevitably such that 

the expected number of hazard events in a given locality is small.

1

Even with perfect statstcs the probabilites 

of small samples are intrinsically unreliable, insofar as the very small number of events that occur in a given 

locaton in the planning tme-frame almost certainly difers signifcantly from the probability distributon. 

Thus probability-based management of low- probability risks is liable to unavoidable unreliability (Davies, 

1993).

As an example of the small sample problem, consider food predicton in a river; we are tasked with predictng 

the number of tmes a fow of say 1000 m3/sec will occur in this river over the next 100 years, in order to 

optmise food management strategies. Assume we have 10,000 years of precise data on this river, and that 

we are confdent that the next 100 years is part of the same statstcal distributon. Examining the past 10,000 

years of data we fnd that 1000 m3/sec is exceeded 162 tmes; we can be prety confdent that in the next 

10,000 years the number of exceedences of 1000 m3/sec will be very close to 162 – or at least, sufciently 

close that our optmisaton will be realised. So we can plan satsfactorily for the next 10,000 years. When 

we focus on the next 100 years, however, we fnd that the most likely number of exceedences is 1.62, which 

obviously cannot be realised in reality

– exceedences either occur or they do not, and 0.62 of an occurrence cannot happen. In reality the number 

of exceedences will be an integer – probably 0, or 1, or 2, or 3. Obviously, which of these occurs is extremely 

important to the success of our optmisaton strategy, and the apparent precision available from the precise 

statstcs is an illusion.

The errors intrinsic to predictng into samples of various sizes are illustrated more generally in Fig. 1. This shows 

the error (± %) in calculatng the largest average of sets of ten various-sized random samples of integers from 

the range 0-99; the average of all the integers in this range is exactly 50. With a sample size of 100 (equivalent 

to predictng a 1-year recurrence-interval event over 100 years) the largest average error is ± 10%; but with a 

sample of two (as in predictng a 50-year event in a 100-year period), the error is ± 95%. This trend is shown 

in terms of event predicton in Fig. 2. Risk analysis can only be a reliable basis for risk management when the 

expected number of events in the management tme-frame is sufciently large that their occurrence can be 

sufciently similar to their probability; i.e. for well-quantfed, frequent, low-intensity events. Larger and less 

frequent hazard events, even if adequately quantfed, cannot be reliably mitgated in a realistc tme-frame 

using probabilistcally- based risk management processes.

However, probabilistc analyses are certainly of value for insurance purposes, because that industry can and 

does spread its risk widely so that the event numbers into which probabilites are projected are large enough 

to ensure that probabilites match outcomes, even for locally infrequent events; but they cannot be reliably 

used for local risks over realistc planning tme-frames.

1 This is in fact the defnition of a hazard; something that occurs suffciently rarely that society does not automatically avoid its effects. For example, people do not try to live below high tide level, because they know the area 

will be frequently covered with water.
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The large error in low-frequency occurrences renders optmisaton routnes such as cost-beneft analyses 

highly questonable. This is because such routnes involve calculatng diferences between costs and benefts, 

both of which are large and imprecise numbers; the resultng net beneft is inevitably a much smaller number 

with an inevitably and much higher imprecision. To give a numerical example:

Fig. 1 Predicton error varying with sample size. The graph shows the largest error in the averages of ten sets 

of samples (of various sizes from 1 to 1000) of random integers between 0 and 99.

Fig. 2 Error in probabilistc predicton of occurrence of a 1-year event in a range of tme periods, derived from 

Fig. 1

Assume we have calculated average annual food damage at a site in the absence of mitgaton as 
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$1,000,000; food damage with mitgaton in place is reduced to $400,000 per year; and the cost of 

mitgaton is $400,000 per year. This yields a net annual beneft of $200,000 per year, or a 20% per 

annum return.

In reality these fgures have errors associated with them; let’s assume this is ±10% on average annual 

costs so the unmitgated cost is really $1,000,000 ±10% or $900,000 – $1,100,000. Likewise, the average 

annual food damage with a mitgaton strategy in place ($400,000 ±10%) is $450,000 - $550,000, so the 

total beneft is $650,000 – $350,000 (or $500,000 ± 30%). To get the net beneft we must subtract the 

annual cost of the mitgaton strategy, which is $400,000

± say 5% or $420,000 - $380,000; this gives an annual net beneft in the range $270,000 to -

$50,000 (or $110,000 ± 145%). This gives quite a diferent impression of the situaton.

Two further difcultes are associated with the probabilistc characterisaton of hazards. One is that assigning 

a future catastrophic event a low probability means that when it occurs, society is probably unprepared for it, 

because its probability is known to be low and preparaton for it is therefore always seen to be of lower priority 

than more immediate and pressing issues.

Finally, generatons of hydrologists and managers have found extreme difculty in communicatng concepts 

of probabilistc food risk management to the lay public. This consttutes yet another fundamental problem 

with probabilistc procedures; if the communites afected are to play a role in decision-making for their future 

safety, as ethics and evolving practce (e.g. Lane et al, 2011) demand, then they need to be able to understand 

how the “experts” are thinking, and where probabilites are concerned this is a serious challenge.

For these reasons, risk management procedures based on probabilistc data are intrinsically and unavoidably 

unreliable as a methodology for reducing the efects of any but routne threats on society. This realisaton 

leaves a gaping void in our portolio of disaster reducton tools, and it is this void that resilience needs to 

be able to address. This we now atempt, startng again with the concept that both the natural systems that 

generate hazard events, and (to a perhaps lesser extent) the societal systems that they impact, behave as 

complex dynamic systems.

The nature of disasters

A disaster can be defned in general as an event (in the present context, an event that is part of the behavioural 

spectrum of Earth’s natural systems) that causes substantal damage to society. Refnements of this defniton 

may include the criterion that the damage cannot be managed and rectfed locally, so that outside resources 

are required; or that a certain number of deaths occurs, and damage exceeds a certain value; but these are not 

necessarily crucial. In reality, a family tragedy is a disaster to those involved, as the Indian Ocean tsunami of 

2004 was a global disaster. In principle, disasters are independent of scale.

A requirement for an event to cause a major disaster to society is that the event is unexpected by society. The reason for this is obvious – if it was expected2

, people would have prepared for it, and it would have 

done manageable damage. At the family level, the expected death of an aged relatve is sad, but the sudden 

death of a child is a disaster, because the later is unexpected; while at the natonal level, a hurricane whose 

2 Note here that genuine expectation means that not only an event’s possibility is recognised, bu t that its occurrence is a real part of the consciously anticipated future of society.
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track and intensity are accurately forecast several days ahead should not cause a disaster because adequate 

preparatons can be made (unless the preparaton and response are unexpectedly inefectve – and that is 

not an event-triggered disaster, it is a societally- triggered disaster). Unexpectedness also implies that 

the event triggering the disaster occurs infrequently, because if it occurred sufciently frequently people 

would remember its previous occurrence(s) and efects, and would expect recurrences in the future.

A natural event at a given locaton can be unexpected for a number of reasons: (i)

the type of event that occurred was unexpected,

(ii) the event magnitude that occurred exceeded current estmates of a maximum credible

event, or

(iii) the event was antcipated but assigned a low probability that reduced its priority and no 

preparatons were undertaken. Finally, with the best arrangements and organisaton in the world,

(iv) people make mistakes.

The frst of these is the result of incomplete knowledge of Earth’s processes, which is understandable and a 

challenge for science. It is exemplifed by, for example, the many sediment deposits untl recently thought to 

be glacial moraines (which represent no hazard untl glacial advance again creates an ice-front in that locaton) 

now shown to be deposits of large rock avalanches (which can potentally indicate a present hazard); see 

e.g. Barth, 2013; McColl and Davies, 2013; Tovar et al., 2008; Hewit, 1999. In terms of the second cause of 

unexpectedness, exceedence of a scientfcally-determined maximum credible event has been remarkably 

common in recent years; for example, considering only earthquakes, the 2004 M9.1 Andaman, 2010 M8.8 

Maule and 2011 M9.0 Tohoku earthquakes all substantally exceeded their scientfcally-determined maximum 

credible magnitudes.

Event frequency or probability is a topic rife with actual and potental misunderstanding. In partcular, the 

concept of a recurrence interval is misleading and ofen poorly expressed as the interval between event 

recurrences – when in reality it is the mean tme interval between recurrences averaged over a large number 

of recurrences. Thus quotng long recurrence intervals for potentally disastrous events does not provide 

informaton that makes them expected, in fact the contrary is true, and lay people especially are likely to not 

expect recurrence of an event that happens rarely. Quotng a long return period or a low probability for an 

event can in fact cause it to be unexpected. This is well illustrated by the earthquakes that hit Christchurch, 

New Zealand in 2010-2011; the probabilistc seismic hazard map of Canterbury (Strling et al., 2008: Fig. 3) 

showed that a peak ground acceleraton (pga) of 0.4g was expected in Christchurch every 1000 years, and that 

a pga of 1.0 in Christchurch was correspondingly less frequent – perhaps of the order of once every 10,000 

to 100,000 years (on average). In 2010-2011 Christchurch experienced one event (Feb 22 2011) with a pga 

of 2.2g, and two others (September 4 2010 and June 23, 2011) with pgas of 1.0 or greater. This extreme event 

sequence was not necessarily incompatble with the probabilistc seismic hazard informaton, and therefore 

could have been expected; but the available informaton on its likelihood did not encourage the people or 

authorites in Christchurch to expect the event to occur in the foreseeable future, or to prepare for it, and the 

earthquake was therefore unexpected – and disastrous - when it occurred.

The reality is that any event can occur at any tme. On this basis, reliable preventon of disasters requires that 

all events must be expected, but this is clearly never going to be the case simply because knowledge of Earth’s 
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systems will always be incomplete. It follows that disasters can never be completely prevented, and will 

inevitably occur in the future, so the objectve herein is to reduce their impacts rather than to prevent them.

Fig. 3 Probabilistc seismic hazard map of Canterbury (Strling et al., 2008)

It may appear that the degree to which an event is expected should be associated with its probability, because 

something that is more probable is by defniton more likely to have occurred in any given past tme-frame 

and is therefore more likely to be expected in the future. The counter to this argument is that the most 

important disaster in a given locality is always the next one, and the next event may not be the most probable 

one. In fact, unless the most probable event has an individual statstcal probability ≥ 50%, it is more likely 

that some other event will occur next. Thus, every event that has been identfed as possible should have the 

same expectability, irrespectve of its probability, because any possible event can be the next that occurs. This 

is consistent with the concept that expectedness is in reality a binary property – something is either expected 

or unexpected, and for present purposes there is really no such thing as partal expectability.

Finally, human error can never be ruled out and but ofen causes unexpected outcomes; given its inevitability, 

there is a strong case to be made for including resilience to human error in as a factor in designing and 

operatng systems.
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Natural and human system behaviours

In talking about systems we need to defne the boundaries of the system under consideraton, and in this 

context Earth is a single, large natural system, isolated except insofar as it receives energy from the Sun and 

some mater (meteorites) from space, and radiates energy into space. This single system comprises a set of 

subsystems (e.g. oceans, atmosphere, land surface, internal processes) that all interact and exchange energy 

and mater with each other, and these in turn host innumerable living and non-living systems that interact 

in the same way. The systems picture of Earth is thus of an immensely complicated set of systems of all 

sizes and types, all interactng with each other at a huge range of tme- and spatal scales. The sciences of 

physics, chemistry and biology describe some of these interactons at some scales, but many of them are 

poorly-known, and much remains unknown, due largely to the complexity of system interactons. Earth’s 

natural systems have evolved to their present state over the ca. 4.5 billion years of its existence. For the vast 

majority of that tme they have been uninfuenced by, and have not infuenced, human behaviour. Thus we 

can consider the behaviour of the natural systems (but not necessarily their present states, e.g. atmospheric 

CO2) to be independent of the presence of human society.

One of Earth’s (natural) current subsystems is the human system (or “society”), which comprises the members 

of the species Homo sapiens and their associated artefacts (the later including modifed natural systems such 

as reservoirs, crops and herds). Society has evolved since the human species itself became distnguishable 

from its progenitors some millions of years ago. Especially in the last few thousand years, society has increased 

dramatcally in scale and complexity. It has also increased its ability to utlise resources for generatng power 

(in the sense of ability to afect natural systems), far beyond that of any other species. Most importantly, it has 

also adopted societally-determined decision-making processes. Society is today rapidly-growing, widespread, 

complex and intricately inter-related, with very rapid transmission of informaton across the system, and 

its behaviour is thus changing rapidly compared to that of most other natural systems. In additon, society 

appears to be increasingly afectng natural system behaviour by altering the compositon of the atmosphere 

and oceans, potentally altering climates worldwide with potentally serious consequences for society.

Earth’s systems have been subject to innumerable shocks throughout their existence, and it is their responses 

to those shocks, together with the evoluton of living systems, that has led to the present system state. During 

this process innumerable species evolved, and most later became extnct because they were not adequately 

resilient to the shocks they experienced. The requirement for society to be sustainable on Earth is that it 

becomes sufciently resilient to future shocks both from Earth’s other systems, and from within itself. As 

we shall see below, development of resilience requires that systems have the ability to adapt and evolve in 

response to the shocks they experience, and this requirement means that society must recognise the realites 

of the environment it is embedded in, and realise the need to be adaptable.

Both natural and human systems are known to behave as “complex dynamic systems” (“cds”; Sornete, 2002). 

This is a class of systems that are complex (in the sense that we are unable to precisely predict their behaviour) 

and which change with tme in response to both internal and external forcings. This means that dramatc 

changes can occur in natural systems both as a result of external inputs (e.g., in the context of Earth systems, 

bolide impacts and solar fares) and internal inputs (e.g. plate tectonic moton causing earthquakes and 

eruptons); similarly, human systems can change rapidly as a result of external (e.g. earthquake) and internal 

(e.g. global fnancial crisis, war) forcing.
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While natural and human systems have many behavioural similarites, one critcal diference is in intentonality. 

As far as we know, non-human systems develop over tme with no internal (or, for present purposes, 

external,) intenton to do so. In this context “intenton” describes the will and the ability to choose behaviour. 

At least at the individual level, humans contnually make choices based on conscious use of memory and 

intellect; as far as we know, this behaviour is not found in individuals of other species to an extent signifcant 

to the present context. Whether this human ability to make choices is also true at the larger scales of families, 

communites and society as a whole is less empirically obvious; for present purposes, we assume it to be the 

case.

Complex dynamic systems in general are characterised by behaviours such as:

• Self-organisaton.

• Positve feedback, in which a disturbance causes a change of behaviour that in turn causes the 

disturbance to amplify.

• Non-linearity, which renders future behaviour unpredictable except by simulaton.

• Emergence, in which large-scale behaviour paterns appear that cannot be antcipated from smallscale behaviour (a natural example is the development of meanders in a turbulent river fow).

• Chaos, in which a system exhibits hypersensitvity to inital conditons, so that its behaviour cannot 

be predicted far into the future unless inital conditons are prescribed in unrealistc detail.

• Heterogeneity, i.e. non-uniformity.

• Unsteadiness, i.e. tme-varying behaviour.

• Behaviour paterns that repeat across a wide range of scales (“scale-free” of “fractal” 

behaviour).

• Bifurcaton, in which a gradual change in an input causes the system to move suddenly to one of two 

available state trajectories

• Power-law probability densites (except for events that occupy much of the system space, which 

occur more frequently than expected – so-called “dragon-King” events; Sornete, 2009, Sornete 

and Ouillon, 2009).

These behaviours have been shown to describe a wide range of both natural (e.g. foods, earthquakes, 

landslides, avalanches, fuid turbulence) and human (e.g. heartbeats, epidemics, fnancial cycles, city 

populaton) systems. They can be simulated in computers, and such simulatons appear to have3successfully 

reproduced such phenomena as the focking behaviour of birds and the synchronicity of frefy fashes, as well 

as species extnctons due to internal system behaviour rather than external input; the behaviours of hearts 

and fnancial markets have also been reproduced using complex system simulatons.

Since both natural systems and society behave as complex dynamic systems, it is ratonal to look at disasters 

as the result of the interacton between two large complex systems, one of which (society) is embedded 

within and intmately linked to – and thus a subsystem of - the other (nature). In other words, we should 

3 I write “appear to have” because no accurate criterion exists to decide whether two particular complex

patterns that look like each other are in fact characteristically similar.
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expect the occurrence of disaster-triggering events to be non-linear, emergent, chaotc – i.e. unpredictable, in 

both common and technical senses of the word. This view leads to the rather negatve percepton that since 

disaster events are fundamentally unpredictable4, then reducing their impacts by deterministc processes (i.e. 

processes based on understanding of how the system has behaved in the past) is unrealistc. Although not 

usually formulated in these terms, the obvious difculty of deterministc disaster management has been 

known for many years, and has led to the current paradigm of probabilistc analysis, with the associated 

ongoing need for beter data to better defne event magnitude-probability relatonships. The view presented 

here is that such data cannot signifcantly improve the situaton, because of intrinsic factors associated with 

complex system behaviour; and also because of intrinsic factors associated with probabilites, as outlined 

above.

Resilience in natural systems

The natural systems of Earth have evolved over billions of years to their present state, and in that state, as 

emphasised above, they have developed behavioural characteristcs that appear to correspond to those of 

complex dynamic systems. This applies to both living and non-living systems, although the living systems 

emerged from the non-living systems a long tme afer the former began operaton. The initaton and 

evoluton of living systems has been intensively studied for centuries, and in spite of considerable controversy 

it is generally accepted that the complexity of ecosystems and species has increased with tme. In the 

commonly-accepted picture, long-term gradual evoluton has been punctuated a number of tmes by sudden 

catastrophes (at least some of external origin) in which large proportons of all existng species became extnct, 

and were replaced by other species that evolved to fll the ecological space lef vacant.

Species require resources and space in order to survive and multply, and resources and space are never 

infnite; thus at some stage, species compete with other species for resources and/or space. This they do by 

evoluton; members of a species that experience stress due to this competton (as well as from other types 

of system shock) either die or survive. Those that survive generally difer from those that die by being beter 

able to survive the full suite of stresses, thus the characteristcs of the non-survivors gradually dwindle in 

the overall species gene-scape, while the characteristcs of the survivors increase. Thus, over tme, species 

evolve to become increasingly resilient to the behaviour of their environments – or, since the environment 

also includes other species which are also evolving, groups of species co-evolve with their environments. 

This evoluton can be viewed as a race towards ever greater resilience in an increasingly compettve and 

occasionally shocking environment. The characteristcs of species or systems of species that have existed for 

a long tme, then, can be expected to be those that confer resilience to the system. These appear to be the 

characteristcs of complex dynamic systems, because a large number of natural systems behave as cds.

Human society has evolved just like all other systems on Earth, so why has it not become resilient by 

adoptng these behaviours? In many cases early human societes unconsciously did just that, and some modern 

indigenous societes stll do, or at least they retain the corresponding behavioural principles in their traditons. 

Increasingly, however, modern society has intentonally superseded these behaviours with others (designed 

to increase e.g. economic efciency, or power of the ruling classes, or obedience to superhuman powers) that 

do not increase resilience to natural system events. Examples of these behaviours are to be found in many 

areas of present-day society, and a few are:

4 Recently Cavalcante et al (2013) have shown that extreme events in a complex system can be forecast in real time, and can be suppressed by applying tiny perturbations to the system. This may indicate future 

possibilities for averting disasters, but only if knowledge of natural and human systems is adequate.
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1. “Just-in-tme” supply of goods from natonal to local centres. This reduces local storage costs by 

centralising storage, but leaves a local populaton very vulnerable to supply interrupton due to a 

disaster cutng transport links.

2. Centralisaton, which increases vulnerability of the core functons to a direct hit, and also constrains 

communicaton.

3. Cost-savings by reducing system redundancy, so that society is critcally dependent on fault- free 

functoning of contnuously-used components.

4. The tendency to move towards homogeneity and steady-state behaviour of economies, and the 

disastrous efect of fnancial swings; a homogenous society is britle, in mechanical terms, because 

a failure at one point can propagate widely through the system causing widespread failure. Greater 

heterogeneity (both spatal and temporal) would arrest the failure before it spread far. Heterogeneity 

in society is like biodiversity in nature – it increases resilience.

5. The tendency to greater simplicity, operatonal ease and “cost-efciency” via top-down

management and communicaton. This reduces the botom-up informaton fow which could warn 

of developing crises.

6. The drive for greater efciency, so that more gets done for less. This is always designed to 

operate in ideal conditons, which in fact rarely occur.

7. The increasing tendency for data-driven decision-making; the result of an increasingly

technical and litgious societal environment, this devalues any informaton that cannot be 

unquestonably quantfed, and again leads to lack of consideraton of the future occurrence 

of events whose past occurrences are poorly quantfed.

Society has been able to develop these behaviours by using technology to increasingly isolate itself 

from many of the system behaviours of the environment, e.g. by controlling rivers so that cites do 

not have to put up with fooding or be moved. While this is efectve for a short tme and against 

minor natural system events, it generally fails when faced with large-scale, and therefore unexpected, 

major system events – i.e., those that trigger disasters. In fact, there is much evidence that controlling 

minor natural system events increases the impacts of larger events when they inevitably occur (e.g. 

Davies and Hall, 1992). As a result of these behaviours, and in spite of increasing expenditure on risk 

management, societal resilience to disasters is not improving notceably at present, and certainly not 

rapidly enough to match the increasing vulnerability of society that results from populaton growth, 

asset growth and increasing rate of commercial actvity. Table 1 summarises the contrasts between 

complex system and societal behaviours.
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Table 1 Comparison of complex system behaviour with societal behaviour5

Characteristcs of complex systems:

*self-organising (botom-up)

*adaptve

*heterogeneous/unsteady

*step changes (bifurcatons)

*distributed

*optmise efectveness

*rapidly responsive

*linked to sub/super systems

*drastc losses accepted

*emergent behaviour expected

Characteristcs of modern societal systems:

*externally-organised/ordered (top-down)

*designed

*uniform/steady

*incremental changes

*centralised/hierarchical

*optmise utlity/efciency

*slowly responsive (politcal)

*isolated from natural sub/super systems

*drastc losses unacceptable

*predictable behaviour expected

If we are seeking strategies by means of which society can become more resilient to disasters, then, 

perhaps one such strategy may be to purposefully increase the extent to which society is structured 

like, and behaves like, a cds. The behaviours in queston include:

• Self-organisaton and adaptaton

• Scale-free spatal and behavioural paterns

• Spatal and temporal heterogeneity

• Expectaton of emergent phenomena

• Isotropic informaton transfer

• Optmisaton of efectveness rather than efciency

5 Note that effciency can only be defned in the context of a system whose inputs and outputs are well -defned and adequately quantifed.
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Some of these have previously been identfed as contributng to urban resilience (e.g. Godschalk,

2003), but have not been specifcally derived from complex system behaviours.

There thus appears to be an associaton between resilience and behaviours that characterise complex dynamic 

systems (e.g. Park et al., 2013). This is hypothetcal at present, and is worthy of investgaton. Supposing for the 

present that this is indeed the case, how can this informaton be used?

Resilient to What? Disaster Scenarios

If adoptng behaviours characteristc of complex dynamic systems can engender resilience, the next queston 

that arises is, how does any part of society know how to organise itself around these preferred behaviours? 

This requires at the very least some idea of what efects resilience is required to reduce. Thus, having cast out 

the most probable event, what does society select as the event to which it needs to become resilient?

One possibility (there may be others) is that a specifc disaster scenario (or suite of scenarios) is selected, its 

full impacts predicted, and societal behaviour altered so that the detrimental efects will be reduced. This 

prepares society for the efects of a specifc event, and provided that this event is the next that occurs (or is 

of the same type as, and greater than, the next event that occurs) then society will beneft by way of reduced 

impacts.

One objecton to this idea is that the scenario selected (whatever it is) is arbitrary, and is neither more likely 

to occur than the most probable event nor more representatve of what the next major event is likely to be, 

so what advantage is gained? A response is that the scenario to which resilience is needed is not the event 

scenario – that is, the natural event triggering the disaster – but the efects scenario, which describes the 

impacts of the event scenario on society. Because the range of disaster efects (e.g. populaton displacement, 

deaths, infrastructure damage, commercial disrupton) is much smaller than the variety of disaster events 

(e.g. food, earthquake, landslide, tornado, blizzard, tsunami) then preparaton for any efects scenario will 

be benefcial to some extent whatever the next event is. Another response is that the event scenario is 

indeed less arbitrary than the most likely event, because it can be selected, by the threatened part of society 

(henceforth “the community”, but in reality any group of people from a family to society as a whole) in 

consultaton with its expert advisors and ofcials, as the scenario to which the community wishes to become 

resilient. The context of its selecton makes it less arbitrary and more relevant than the most likely event. In 

many ways, a carefully-chosen scenario (or set of scenarios) is much more relevant to a community seeking 

resilience than is a set of event magnitudes and probabilites.

A scenario also has the advantage that it is easily comprehended by everyone; scientsts, government ofcials, 

lifelines organisatons and lay members of the public. Thus there is no segregaton of understanding, and 

everyone involved is able to discuss the situaton on an equal footng. This enables the full partcipaton of the 

community in decision-making that lies at the core of successfully developing resilience (e.g. Nirupama & 

Maula, 2013; Gaillard and Mercer, 2012). Further, a scenario that has no probability associated with it is likely 

to be taken seriously as a likely representatve of the next major disaster trigger that can occur, without being 

deprioritsed relatve to more likely but less disastrous events; and resilience to a large event automatcally 

confers resilience to all smaller events of the same type. If the scenario is accepted by the community as able 
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to occur at any tme – which is in most cases literally true – the difcultes of “educatng” the public about 

probabilites cease to be relevant. And, of course, a scenario that the community has chosen will be accepted 

by the community.

Scenarios have been used for many years as the basis for exercises for groups such as armed forces and 

emergency managers, and the values of these exercises in improving the response to conficts and emergencies 

is well demonstrated (UNDHA, 1993; Ringland and Schwarz, 1998; Robinson et al., 2014). As a result, considerable 

literature exists on scenario development, but this has rarely (if ever) been used to inform disaster resilience.

The relatvely limited range of disaster efects also suggests that a community that develops resilience to a 

specifc disaster scenario will also be signifcantly more resilient to a range of diferent disasters; ultmately, 

any resilience is beter than none. In additon, because (as has been noted above) resilience is frst and foremost 

a behavioural atribute, then adoptng resilient behaviours will ensure that the community (and its advisers) 

remain on the lookout for changes in the preferred events and efects scenarios. The former may occur as a 

result of climate change, for example, or (more likely) as a result of changes in the way scientsts understand 

hazard events; the later will always be changing as society changes due to increasing populaton, advancing 

technology and (hopefully) increased resilience.

The role of the worst-case scenario needs to be considered here. It is ofen possible to scientfcally defne a 

maximum credible event for any given process, and evidently if society can become resilient to its efects then 

the problem is solved for that type of event. However, recent experience suggests that maximum credible 

event magnitudes are unreliable: examples are the 2004 M9.1 Andaman, 2010

M7.0 Hait, 2010 M8.8 Maule and 2011 M9.0 Tohoku earthquakes, all of which exceeded their maximum 

credible magnitudes by a signifcant margin. In additon, the maximum credible event is by defniton the 

least likely to occur, and this is a disincentve for its use as a basis for developing resilience. Nevertheless, the 

worst-case scenario has value as (hopefully) an end member indicaton of what can occur, and increases a 

community’s knowledge of natural system behaviour.

The role of standards

From the above it is clear that standards, in the conventonal sense of absolute quanttatve levels which 

specifc performance indicators can be required by law to meet, are applicable only to the level of threat 

(“routne”, in the scheme adopted herein) that can itself be adequately quantfed in order that a standard 

can be justfed. A wide range of quasi-standards already exists in this area, including building codes, fre 

regulatons, safety regulatons for automobiles and provision of lifeboats on ships, and these can presumably 

be transformed into standards fairly easily, and enforced of politcal will is sufcient.

While many of these measures are event-specifc, a number are not. As an example, the provision of lifeboats 

on a ship does not require specifcaton of the event that causes the ship to sink; it simply recognises that the 

environment of a ship is intrinsically threatening. This gives a potental lead into the possibility of generatng 

guidelines – which may eventually be able to be codifed as standards – for increasing the intrinsic resilience of 

communites against non-specifc threats, by way of adaptng their organisaton and behaviour so that they 

are less intrinsically vulnerable to disrupton by any event, be it externally-generated or internally-generated. 
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It may, for example, be feasible to take some of the key behaviours associated with complex dynamic systems 

outlined above and nominate them as key elements – that may evolve to become quantfable characteristcs 

– that indicate progress towards resilience. These might include for example

• the degree of decentralisaton and redundancy of critcal infrastructure;

• the degree of spatal heterogeneity in society;

• the degree of design for increased efectveness under all circumstances, rather than for 

maximum efciency under ideal circumstances;

• the degree of consideraton of long-term societal and environmental evoluton, which will 

require a degree of de-politcisaton of resilience planning;

• the degree of acceptance that circumstances will change, and willingness to adapt 

accordingly;

• the degree of isotropic and rapid communicaton throughout communites.

All of these are defnable and quantfable, even if acceptable levels will always be difcult to choose. In the 

sense that the basic need is for increasing resilience, and in the knowledge that the next event to which 

resilience will be required may be many years away, then perhaps minimum decadal increases in these values 

might be defnable by standards, and in this way these elements might lay the basis for achievable progress 

in the medium-term future. Whether other standards might be developed to ensure, for example, proper 

community involvement in decision-making around resilience (e.g. OECD, 2014) remains to be seen.

Conclusion

In order to develop standards for resilience the concept needs to be clarifed, and a ratonal clarifcaton is 

to assume that future events whose occurrence cannot be adequately quantfed require intrinsic societal 

resilience to be increased in order to reduce the damage from the disasters these events will cause. Damage 

from adequately quantfable future events can be reduced reliably by risk management procedures, but such 

events are minor and rather frequent and fall into the category of routne events. Standards for managing 

routne events can be codifed now. Standards for the concept of resilience as assumed herein require 

quantfcaton of societal characteristcs and behaviours that increase resilience, and it is hypothesised that 

such characteristcs correspond to complex dynamic system behaviour, so these may be able to become key 

elements in aspiratonal standards. Protocols for community engagement in scenario development may 

also be able to be standardised.

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C.5: Societal Resilience, Meir Elran, Senior Research Fellow, 

Institute of National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University

Resilience, as a generic term, is the capacity of any system – physical, human, social, organizational, or 

economic - to bounce back quickly following a major disruption, so as to ensure the earliest possible 

recovery, the return to its basic form and to its required operational functionality. Societal resilience is 

mostly an inherent trait of the human race, even though diferent societies and communities, in diferent 

places, manifest diferent levels of resilience in diferent disruptions. The level of societal resilience is not 

a given trait. It can and should be enhanced in advance, in order to ensure its full efectiveness. It has 

to be accomplished in a carefully preplanned manner, in accordance with the relevant threats, so as to 

maximize the capacities of the society to overcome a major disruption and to return quickly to normal 

functionality. 

Several points should be emphasized and clarifed:

• Resilience is meaningful only in circumstances of major disruptions, or disasters, man-made or 

natural. The term itself seems to be less signifcant. What really matters is the public subjective 

perception of the defning event and its consequences. From an overall political perspective, it is 

the public perception that counts. The actual level of damage, both human and physical, is mostly 

a contributing factor. 

• Measuring resilience is a major challenge. In most cases, it is gauged by subjective surveys, in 

which people are asked to attest to their own sense of their resilience. This might be of interest, 

but not really sufcient. There is a need for a quantitative empirical methodology of benchmarking 

societal resilience. One could fnd several such ventures in the professional literature, but those 

are not really developed and are hardly acceptable as recognized tools. I suggest that we focus on 

this challenge of measuring societal resilience, perhaps through the juxtaposition of the severity of 

the disruption and the time framework of bouncing back following the disruption. The main thrust 

of such a methodology would be to produce clear quantitative answers to the question of how 

quickly a given system returns to its initial functionality.

• More specifcally, we need to reach a level of accurate analysis that could diferentiate between 

diferent levels of societal resilience: at least low, medium or high. From studies conducted in 

Israel, we have found that diferent sectors of the public respond in diferent ways to disruptions; 

some sectors show a consistently higher level of resilience, manifested in a swifter bouncing 

back, than other groups. These studies also found indicators of very high resilience, manifested 

not only by swift bouncing back, but also by reaching a higher level of functionality than was 

gauged before the disruptions occurred. This was the case in the protracted terrorist campaign of 
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the Palestinian second intifada (2000 – 2004), when in the dire context of more than 1000 fatalities, 

85% of them civilians, the overall social resilience of the Israeli public has been estimated as high 

and becoming more so, as time and the challenges evolved. Toward the end of the intifada and 

shortly afterwards, the degree of functionality was higher than the one measured throughout the 

period, as was measured by several benchmarks. 

• We all understand that diferent communities react diferently to similar threats. Still, it is 

imperative to improve our capacity to understand what the main features are that make one 

community more resilient than another. If we gain a clearer understanding of the roots of societal 

resilience, we can focus our eforts on enhancing resilience before disruption occurs.

• And lastly, what is missing is the necessary transformation of the notion of resilience from a 

commonly used buzzword to a structured paradigm for action. In many instances, especially in 

Israel, we hear a lot of resilience. Much less is being actually invested in making sure that our 

systems, infrastructure and communities, become more resilient. I would suggest that more 

professional work is needed to clarify the practical meaning of resilience, how it should best 

be measured, and what should specifcally be done to ensure progress on the road to systemic 

resilience.

Israel has unfortunately been in a continuous state of external manmade threat to its security. More 

than half of our citizens were exposed, for ffty consecutive days, this summer, to an average of 90 daily 

rockets launched from Hamas-controlled Gaza. The resilience of our civilian population facing these 

protracted disruptions has been very high. It is manifested and can be measured by the swift return to 

normalcy following the stoppage of regular functioning due to sirens of incoming rocket attacks. We 

have also seen that civilians living in close proximity to the Gaza border, who have been constantly and 

intensively harassed by rockets, mortars and ofensive tunnels, have left their residences, but returned, 

together with their families and children, immediately following the declarations of cease-fres, despite the 

fact that most of those did not last. This is a clear expression of high societal resilience. 

This resilience has deep roots. For years, resilience-enhancement programs have been implemented in 

many of those communities. Many, though not all, of those projects have proved themselves successful. 

Still, we see diferences in the conduct of diferent communities and social groups, even in a limited highrisk area such as the Gaza border region. Some show greater and others demonstrate comparatively less 

resilience. Overall, their systemic behavior can be studied as a model of a national social laboratory of 

resilience. 

The level of resilience of the critical infrastructure in Israel has not been tested. There is room to suspect 

that it is not as high as needed, mostly because the scope of resilience-oriented preparedness programs 

has been rather limited. I would presume that we need a major disruptive event to serve as a wake-up 

call.
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To sum up, I would like to suggest that we should work together to transfer the issue from the level of 

politics and communication, to the operational level by systematically promoting long range resilience 

community programs, that would involve all sectors that would be relevant following disruptions. The 

potential is there; the experience and knowhow are there. What seems to be missing is the leadership that 

comprehends that resilience is a worthwhile framework for action. Resilience can and should compete 

with the paradigm of resistance, which managed to solicit most of the resources dedicated to disaster 

consequence reduction. It is my repeated proposition to the decision makers in Israel, to consider 

diverting just 10% of the budget allocated to resistance projects to resilience enhancement ventures in 

the communities. This will most certainly pay of lavishly following crisis situations.

1. Resilience is a broad notion, used by diferent people in quite diferent ways. For any practical 

objective, there is a need to set an accepted framework for the term and its meaning. As was 

manifested in the NIST discussions, we are still quite far from this status. It is quite a vast challenge, 

as there seems to be a signifcant gap between the abstract concept of resilience, as a state of mind, 

and the practical requirements of setting standards, even in a general form of a framework for action. 

There is also a meaningful gap between the basically technological approach of scientists coming 

from the engineering world and the social sciences. Encouraging steps of integration between these 

two approaches have been made at the NIST conference, but more are needed to construct an 

acceptable defnition to resilience.

2. Even the Presidential directive 21’s defnition of resilience6 needs to be refned for the sake of the 

NIST’s standards needs. I would suggest to use the notion of “recover rapidly” as the central most 

important practical component, and to focus on it as a basis for developing the concept associated 

with “bouncing 

3. back” and “bouncing forward”, as the ultimate goal of any resilience policy. A vital part of such an 

endeavor would be to construct a measuring system for benchmarking resilience in whatever feld, 

particularly that of infrastructure. Such metrics would enable a common gauging of the resiliency of 

systems in the context of disruptions, to be based mostly on the time and trajectory of the bouncing 

back trend of the given system. 

4. The component of disruption (or catastrophe, disaster etc.) should be regarded as an essential part of 

the theory of resilience. Without a disruption of any kind, There is no theoretical or practical meaning of 

resilience. Hence, the inclusion of “routine” situations in the concept of resilience is superfuous. The 

only place for routine within the theory of resilience is for the sake of gauging the degree of bouncing 

back following disruptions, as a baseline for the conduct of the examined system. 

5. It has been widely discussed in the conference, and there is room to state this again: The social 

components of resilience are as important (some will say even more important) than the technical 

6 The term “resilience” means the ability to prepare for and adapt to changing conditions and withstand and recover rapidly from disruptions. Resilience includes the ability to withstand and recover from deliberate attacks, 

accidents, or naturally occurring threats or incidents”. 
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aspects, even when we deal with infrastructure resilience. The role of people, networks, communities, 

customers, leaders, is always paramount. Hence, when one searches for means to enhance resilience, 

there is a major need for education and communication, to actively engage with politicians, business 

leaders, NGO’s, and the like. Community resilience programs have proven to be efective in time 

of crisis. They must be perceived as important part of any whole of community eforts for the 

enhancement of resilience of infrastructure. 

6. There is a need for further research on the many faces of resilience, and particular on the 

interdependencies of societal and infrastructure resilience. As of now, most of the studies on 

resilience are “silo based”, where each discipline has its own separate communities, researchers, 

journals and conferences. It is time to try to integrate the feld and to focus collaboratively on two 

major issues of resilience: Resilience enablers – the factors that make a system more resilient, and 

resilience measuring – methodologies (mostly quantitative) to benchmark resilience. Once we reach 

the needed stage of understanding these factors, it will be easier to transform the notion of resilience 

from a state of “buzzword” to a working agenda. For the purpose of reaching this stage, there is 

a need for an international cooperation, integrating the knowledge and experience of the various 

cultures in the globe. 
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C.6: Reflections on the International Resilience Symposium, Russell 

E. Bowman

Earlier this month, Northeastern University’s Center for Resilience Studies, in partnership 

with The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), hosted a two-day “International 

Resilience Symposium” at the NIST Headquarters in Gaithersburg, MD. Participants from across 

government, various industries, standards-focused organizations (such as the National Fire 

Protection Association and the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety), academia, 

and NGOs, along with representatives from 13 countries, convened to address, through panel 

discussions and break-out sessions, three critical issues. Specifcally, the event concurrently 

explored mechanisms for advancing community and infrastructure resilience; developing 

appropriate, usable standards for each; and creating the demand (i.e., incentives) arguably 

necessary for these initiatives to succeed.

In opening the frst plenary session, Dr. Stephen Flynn, Director of the Center for 

Resilience Studies, noted that while governments (at the federal, state, and local levels, as well 

as internationally) have increased their respective eforts to promote resilience, most continue 

to struggle with achieving tangible improvements on any type of regional, cross-sector scale. 

He suggested that four specifc barriers are impeding progress in this regard. Namely, that (1) 

we do not recognize how unprepared we are to handle foreseeable risks and uncertainties; (2) 

we do not have incentives to create resilience; (3) we do not know how to measure resilience 

because there is not yet consensus on how to create it (i.e., we lack an integrative approach); 

and (4) there are organizational and governance barriers to creating resilience.

Drawing from the author’s memory and notes on each presentation, this paper analyses 

the dialogue and specifc recommendations generated through the course of the symposium. 

It does so in three sections. First, it documents the extent to which the contributions of the 

various symposium participants (whether formal presenters, panel discussants, or participants 

in the various breakout sessions) validated, and provided insights concerning, each of the 

barriers to improving resilience described by Dr. Flynn. Next, it suggests four additional themes 

– complexity, community, culture, and communication – that ran throughout the conversations. 

Finally, this paper comments on fve tangible recommendations that emerged during the 

symposium, which, in the author’s opinion, hold particular promise for advancing resilience.

While the symposium was not organized around the four aforementioned barriers to 

enhancing resilience, they nonetheless surfaced as recurring themes. The following section 

consolidates the key comments made regarding each obstacle, regardless of the particular 

panel or session in which the comment was made. Each barrier is discussed in turn.
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We don’t recognize how unprepared we are to handle foreseeable risks and 

uncertainties.

The frst barrier to advancing national resilience incorporates four related subcomponents: (1) as a society we tend to overestimate our current capabilities to deal with 

catastrophes and disruptions; (2) we are generally biased toward (inappropriately) discounting 

the risks of aging infrastructure and the leading indicators of change; (3) we design and build 

based on assumptions of stationarity (i.e., that a 100-year event will always remain a 100-year 

event); and (4) politicians are loathe to look for, or acknowledge, community or infrastructure 

risks to the extent doing so (without adequate resources to address them) becomes a political 

liability.

Interestingly, perhaps the strongest voices stressing this related set of challenges were 

those representing the federal government itself. [Name redacted] observed that “there is 

something about human nature that makes it diffcult to assess true risk and incorporate that 

into our decisions.” [Name redacted] used this point to stress the importance of incorporating 

more social science into resilience research and improvement eforts. [Name redacted] also 

highlighted the “high probability, high consequence challenge” of “climate change” or “global 

warming” (whatever term you want to use), to underscore the need for breaking assumptions 

of stationarity. In [pronoun redacted] words, “a ‘bouncing back’ model will not work, as the old 

conditions will not apply... resilience has to incorporate more adapting and planning to future 

projections (not just the historic past). We are going to have to be comfortable looking at [and 

planning to] projections.”

[Name redacted], stated the challenge more bluntly. “We still do not understand 

the inter-dependencies and cascading effects of climate change on critical infrastructure. 

We need to look at risk in a new way. Now things are much more multi-dimensional. Our 

critical infrastructure has its own interdependencies in [each sector’s] silos. But there are 

interdependencies among these [sector] silos as well.” Regarding the political challenges to 

acknowledging and prioritizing resilience, [name redacted] noted how numerous threats abroad 

place an even greater strain on the availability of resources for such domestic initiatives. “These 

days, with anything that happens overseas, you have to look at the unintended consequences on 

infrastructure,” [name redacted] observed.

We don’t have incentives to create resilience.

Included within this second barrier are the inter-related notions that (1) there are few 

rewards for investing in resilience; (2) routine efciency and optimization (e.g., eliminating 

redundancy and utilizing just-in-time delivery) are valued over continuity of function; (3) we are 

skilled at transferring risk to others (but not reducing or eliminating it); and (4) we are not sure 
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how to measure resilience (or what it is). Symposium participant comments stressed the frst, 

third, and last of these points in particular.

On the frst point, most speakers went beyond the observation that there are few 

rewards (or “carrots”) for investing in resilience to noting the number of actual disincentives

for undertaking resilience improvements that exist under current policies. As [name redacted] 

pointed out, the Staford Act’s very design guarantees federal funds for 75% of (publicly owned) 

infrastructure loses. As a matter of practice, Congress routinely authorizes funds above this 

default cost-share percentage (often efectively providing 90-100% reimbursement rates). 

Moreover, [name redacted] noted, the number of presidentially declared disasters and the 

percentages of the total losses paid by the (federal) government for each have been steadily 

increasing over time.

[Name redacted] stressed the signifcance of the moral hazard problem created by how 

the Staford Act has been implemented. “[I]t is diffcult to fnd anyone who is anti-resilience; 

but you do fnd people who believe that the federal government is going to bail them out. The 

[organization redacted] has identifed this as one of their challenges,” [name redacted] noted. 

A signifcant component of all discussions concerning incentives revolved around the 

lack of available information on infrastructure-based liabilities. [Name redacted], put it bluntly: 

What is the exposure on the public side of infrastructure? We don’t know! We can’t 

price something in the market, absent knowing what it is. There is little incentive to fnd 

out! ... One of the incentives [we develop] has to be about whether we are willing to be 

transparent about the exposure. Otherwise we are transferring risk, and doing so behind 

a curtain. Today’s system says its best to not fully know what your risk issues are, and to 

just wait for another system [or Administration?] to come in to fnd out.

[Name redacted] agreed. “We do need to incentivize agencies to inventory. [organization 

redacted] does this because we buy insurance. Most public entities don’t [and remain 

self-insured]. We need to get public entities to understand their assets.” [Name redacted] 

comments highlighted one of the few existing “rewards” for investing in resilience: lower 

insurance premiums.

Unfortunately, this reward is generally only applicable to those entities who either 

choose, or are forced, to procure private insurance.

Several commenters considered the issue of enhancing infrastructure resilience from 

a cost-beneft perspective. This approach prompted discussions about the need for a clearer 

“value proposition” and chain of incentives to ensure improvements are made. [Name redacted] 

framed this idea as follows: “Every step of the way, all the stakeholders are going to do a 

beneft-cost analysis. If anywhere in that progression [from the status quo to a future, more 
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resilient state] there is not a clear, benefcial next step, we get stuck (for lack of any reason to 

move forward). That’s why incentives are going to be so important.” Similarly, [name redacted], 

argued the need to “map the relevance” for each stakeholder to get more involved in such 

resilience improvement eforts. In a similar vein, [name redacted] suggested that to leverage 

private investment, there is a need to better show how enhancing resilience is value (if not 

revenue) positive.

[Name redacted], ofered an additional interesting point on incentives, which ties back 

to the challenge of our collective bias toward (inappropriately) discounting risks. [Pronoun 

redacted] observed that, in general, people are always looking at short-term pay-ofs.

 When it comes to critical infrastructure, [pronoun redacted] argued, “we need to develop 

incentives that reach long term.” This point was made all the more meaningful by [name 

redacted] 

 observation that “we only replace 1-2% of the nation’s building stock each year.”

We lack an integrative approach to advancing resilience.

The third suggested barrier to enhancing national resilience arises from the current 

lack of any widespread agreement on what resilience is, and how best to measure it. This, in 

turn, results in the absence of any comprehensive, interdisciplinary, systems-based approach 

to tackling this challenge. As with the other barriers to resilience already discussed, the 

symposium participants’ professional opinions and observations confrmed the presence and 

signifcance of this impediment to progress. The following representative refections further 

illustrate this point.

[Name redacted] recounted his methodology for a “resilience project” that [pronoun 

redacted] frm recently completed for the Port of New York and New Jersey concerning buses 

at the Battery Park terminal. Applying a systems approach, the frm brought together, in a 

workshop format, a variety of city departments and stakeholders to better understand how the 

entire transit system functions (and interacts with other systems). [Name redacted] explained 

that it was simply not possible to understand everything one would need to know about that (or 

any given) system by simply studying a line drawing. “Unless you look at the interdependencies 

[by mapping how the systems function] you can’t achieve resilience,” [pronoun redacted] 

observed. Critically for present purposes, [name redacted] noted that this was the frst civil 

engineering project he was aware of (anywhere) that undertook this type of integrated, functionbased process.

 [Name redacted], recounted a similar lack of integrative approaches in his discussion 

of “Resilience, Health, and Health Systems” – a study of the continuity of care and of the public 

health system in the wake of Superstorm Sandy. [Name redacted] work highlighted the critical 
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interplay between infrastructure and social systems, the consequences of which had not been 

fully anticipated. When the greater New York Metropolitan area lost 10% of its bed capacity 

due to fooding and power outages, many patients were displaced from highly regulated (and 

monitored) hospitals to less regulated, community-based care facilities. The home healthcare 

workers that staf such facilities, however, had difculty getting to work (to provide the needed 

continuity of care) because they were not deemed “essential” in the same way that hospital 

staf are. Further study and understanding of the interaction between infrastructure and social 

systems, [name redacted] concluded, is required to improve the continuity of health care 

function. [Name redacted] noted an additional challenge in conducting this work. As in other 

sectors, there is no accepted (human) measure for determining how resilient a given public 

health system is. 

Other related observations were more brief, but equally poignant. [Name redacted], 

commented on how “we don’t think about the collateral effects of some of our mitigation 

measures.” The lack of a holistic, system-of-systems approach that incorporates 

interdependencies within and across sectors could have dire consequences, [name redacted] 

suggested. Given that fooding is often a “game of inches,” [name redacted] observed “if you 

plug the Holland tunnel [as some post-Sandy improvement proposals are calling for], the water 

will rise higher elsewhere.” “Who is looking at that?” [pronoun redacted] wondered.

There are organizational and governance barriers to creating resilience.

The fourth barrier to enhancing resilience arises, in part, from the fact that lifeline 

infrastructures (transportation, energy, communication, and water) are regional systems 

that are inherently interdependent, yet we are organized to manage them by sector, and 

through local, state, and federal constructs. This approach overlooks the regional nature and 

interdependencies among the systems. Moreover, organizationally, we tend to “fght the last 

battle” or, in the present context, prepare for, and act based on, the last disaster. Here again, a 

diverse set of participants validated this challenge through their remarks.

Perhaps the most succinct expression of this point came from [name redacted], who 

noted that “disasters happen to communities, not governments. Communities work in highly 

complex ways. It is important to recognize that orientation.” 

Addressing the structural barriers to enacting more resilient building standards, [name 

redacted], lamented how “some states, through their governance structure, can’t enact 

certain building codes. We are only in the high single digits for states that actually follow all 

national (model) building codes.” Eforts to develop and enact uniform codes of any type are 

further complicated by budgetary and federalism concerns. [Name redacted] explained that 

implementing uniform building standards through federal regulations is problematic (beyond 
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any potential limits on federal authority to do so) as the Ofce of Management and Budget and 

Congressional Budget Ofce will require any such regulations to show how implementation 

costs that will be borne by the states will be ofset. This, [name redacted] suggested, might 

be difcult to do. Relatedly, [name redacted], questioned the appropriate balance of power 

between the federal and state governments in this area: “if a state didn’t adopt a statewide 

building code, should the federal government require it to?”

Other participants commented on related organizational impediments to securing better, 

inter-disciplinary resilience research. [Name redacted], observed that “research is linked 

to sources of funding. In order to get a more coherent body of research on resilience, it is 

necessary to get a more coherent (and consistent?) source of funding. Projects are developed 

based on where researchers can get the resources to do them.” Accordingly, current research is 

largely compartmentalized around fairly discrete (not, holistic) issues that are tied to the specifc 

interests of the myriad agencies funding resilience related projects. [Name redacted], agreed 

with [name redacted] point. “Where the government decides to fund, we will go to it.”

In sum, the foregoing comments, and many others like them, confrm that the four 

barriers to advancing resilience proposed at the outset of the symposium are very real indeed.

The barriers to resilience, however, were not the only recurring themes that surfaced 

during the symposium. The following section proposes four additional concepts that, while 

inter-related with each of the aforementioned obstacles, are critically distinct therefrom. In the 

author’s opinion, these core concepts were woven throughout the discussions and provide a 

useful alternative framework for considering the key takeaways from the event.

Complexity 

All who spoke about the lessons of Hurricane Sandy stressed, in some manner, the need 

to better understand the complex interdependencies (and resultant cascading failures) within 

and among the lifeline infrastructure sectors that were devastated by the “predictable surprise” 

of that storm. A separate series of complexity-themed comments centered on how American 

communities are all unique. Because of this heterogeneity, many opined, there cannot be a 

one-size-fts-all approach to resilience. Clearly, the need to better comprehend complex issue 

falls under the heading of “we don’t recognize how unprepared we are.” A related discussion – 

which is perhaps better categorized under the caption of complexity itself, rather than the rubric 

of our bias toward discounting future risk and overestimating our current abilities – is how to 

best disentangle these problems.

The consensus of those present was that, to be efective at understanding complexity 

and enhancing resilience, we must discern and appreciate the desired functionalities of each 

community.
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Additionally, a chorus of voices acknowledged the need to view advancing community 

resilience and critical infrastructure resilience as inter-related goals, which are best viewed 

through a systems (and system of systems) perspective. While these ideas are certainly not new 

– indeed, they were the focus of Dennis Mileti’s 1999 book “Disasters by Design,” – it is telling 

that they were repeated throughout the symposium.

Interestingly, those stressing this complexity theme were apparently preaching to the 

choir. Attempts to compartmentalize the symposium discussions themselves were questioned 

by several participants. In one set of breakout sessions, for example, one group was asked to 

discuss potential economic incentives for spurring investments in resilience, while another was 

asked to consider (broader) policy based incentives. [Name redacted], who was assigned to the 

policy incentive group discussion, openly questioned, “Shouldn’t we be having this conversation 

with the [participants in the] economic incentives discussion? Aren’t they inter-related?”

Community

Given that the NIST event was designed to prompt discussions on methods for 

enhancing, standards for measuring, and incentives for spurring community resilience (in 

addition to critical infrastructure resilience), it is not surprising that the idea of “community” 

came up frequently. What is perhaps surprising, especially for a dialogue that occurred in the 

nation’s headquarters for technical standards, was the number of times and variety of contexts 

in which “community” was discussed. [Name redacted], noted how “community needs 

drive functional requirements” for infrastructure. There is much more to the importance of 

communities, however, than their relation to building and materials standards.

Community characteristics matter. [Name redacted], noted that [name redacted] studies 

of Israelis in the wake of security-oriented disruptions suggest that the ability to “bounce back” 

is heavily infuenced by the nature of the communities afected. “Communities that are more 

socially active, and philanthropic,” [pronoun redacted] noted, “are more resilient.” 

While resilience can be built at the individual, household, and community level, the 

numerous comments concerning “community” suggest that a critical force in enhancing national

resilience will, and necessarily must, be communities themselves. Along that line of thinking, 

[name redacted] argued that what any “resilience initiative” needs is an advocacy “community” 

of its own. Specifcally, [pronoun redacted] pointed to how Mothers Against Drunk Driving was 

able, through efective lobbying, media outreach, and other grass roots initiatives, to create 

a sea change in how drunk driving is viewed by the public, and treated by the government. 

Something similar, [pronoun redacted] suggested, will be required – but does not concurrently 

exist – to bring about the type of large-scale improvements in resilience that those in attendance 

have been advocating.
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Culture

An important component of building an advocacy community is instilling a “culture 

of resilience” into our social fabric. As [name redacted] put it, “we need to get to the tipping 

point of a culture of resilience to make the political climate more workable.” The importance of 

fundamentally changing our culture surfaced in a variety of comments and contexts. 

[Name redacted] observed that resilience success (evident in the anecdotes ofered 

by [name redacted] and others) appears to grow out of a sense of responsibility (a cultural 

characteristic). [Name redacted], recounted how [pronoun redacted] agency has been targeting 

this issue through a subtle shift in focus from response, to individual preparedness and 

prevention (including through a recently released preparedness app). [Name redacted], ofered 

a similar prescription, suggesting that we must focus on education and getting people “used to” 

the concept of resilience in order to affect needed change. There was clearly consensus that 

a shift away from dependency on government (in terms of both rescue and bail out) to one of 

preparedness and personal responsibility is needed.

An additional aspect to both culture and community themes was the importance of 

building trust and connectedness within and among communities, sectors, and interests; ideally, 

in advance of an event. As [name redacted] observed, “it is about relationships and trust.” 

[name redacted] agreed, “trust and connectedness are absolutely essential [to overcoming] the 

myriad structural barriers to the goal we are aspiring to.”

Communication

A fnal cross-cutting theme that emerged – which can be seen in many of the comments 

concerning the need for cultural change – is the importance of communication (with respect to 

both education and transparency). [Name redacted] expressed the essence of this theme well. 

“What we need is to fgure out how to communicate the right information, at the right time, in 

the right form. We keep fnding a lot of our information [and research] is lost in translation; it is 

not understood by people who need to make decisions.” This point, while made with respect 

to politicians and policymakers, should be construed to include individuals and households as 

well.

Indeed, [name redacted] argued, one of the major reasons there is an empirically 

documented high rate of community resilience in Israel is because of a culture in which 

everyone maintains a elevated degree of situational awareness. Critically, this is enabled by 

that government’s eforts to disseminate information in an open and timely fashion. Such 

transparency “has to be promoted on a regular basis,” [name redacted] suggested. “[People] 

have to understand not only what the risk is, but what must be done.”

In addition to better communicating threats, many participants saw the necessity and 
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potential power in forcing more transparency in infrastructure risks and liabilities. Because 

Protected Critical Infrastructure Information (PCII) information is so tightly held, often only 

trusted “security” personnel within a given organization have access to it. Yet, in many 

instances this information is even more meaningful to professional engineers or other technical 

experts that could provide a more holist view of the associated vulnerabilities and means for 

reducing them. [Name redacted] argued, “we need a trusted atmosphere where this information 

is (more) available” to enable the type of multi-disciplinary, integrative approach to resilience we 

have been discussing. Relatedly, some, including [name redacted] and [name redacted], saw 

regulatory requirements that would mandate inventories and disclosure of infrastructure risks as 

a potential forcing function for improvement. While required transparency might indeed create 

the very political liabilities that resource constrained politicians fear, mandating such disclosures 

(from above) would provide signifcant incentives for creative action (despite the pervasive lack 

of adequate funding at the local level).

Whether couched in terms of external threats or internal vulnerabilities, all of these 

comments provide a clear message: more open communication among wider audiences is 

needed to further enhance resilience.

This fnal section highlights tangible recommendations that emerged during the course of the 

symposium, which, in the author’s personal opinion, hold particular importance or promise. It 

does not recapitulate all of the observations and recommended actions from each panel and 

breakout session. Instead, the following discussion reviews fve suggestions that appear 

capable of overcoming the noted barriers to resilience, while concurrently addressing one or 

more of the core themes of complexity, community, culture, and communications.

Develop and deploy (more) policy “fight simulators.”

Several presenters extolled the virtues of recent innovations in visualizing “big data.” 

Related advancements in complex, non-linear, dynamic modeling have led to the creation of 

decision support tools that provide policymakers with the ability to model multiple “what-if” 

scenarios and to “see” the likely cross-sector consequences of various policy choices. Some 

eforts are already underway to apply these technologies to decision-making in the resilience 

realm. ([Name redacted], for example, detailed [pronoun redacted] eforts with a GIS-based 

environment that incorporates functionally realistic infrastructure and engineering systems). 

More investment is needed, however, in applying these technologies to improving national 

resilience on a larger scale.

The benefts of doing so are, at least, fourfold. First, such policy “fight simulators” 

have the potential to simplify (through visualization) the complex interconnected systems 

to which achieving resilience is linked. Second, focused eforts on developing new, or 
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integrating existing, systems will likely spur greater research and understanding of crosssector interdependencies. Third, widespread use and experience “playing with” such tools will 

make infuential actors more comfortable (and thus, more inclined to consider) the concept of 

resilience in other contexts. Fourth, the resulting increase in resilience “fuency” will foster an 

environment more conducive to achieving a fundamental cultural shift.

Propagate disaster case studies (and rapid response teams in support thereof).

While developing and deploying policy fight simulators will require additional time 

and funding, we need not wait on such eforts to communicate our current resilience risks 

and opportunities. As Dr. Flynn remarked, “disasters are a terrible thing to waste.” Political 

scientists have long studied how catastrophes and other “focusing events” open narrow 

“policy windows” of opportunity for enacting meaningful change. There is much to be learned 

from volumes of existing, readily accessible post-disaster data. The ever-growing number of 

disaster and resilience-focused research centers – which have historically proven instrumental 

in promulgating research – are poised to help open our eyes to the challenges, and change our

culture by broadly communicating these lessons learned.

To raise the quality of the data underlying such research and education eforts (and to 

help foster the resilience community of practice discussed further below), funding agencies 

should look to supporting deployable, post-disaster research teams, similar to the quick 

response studies that have been used by the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center 

and funded by the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center to further the felds of 

disaster sociology, crisis decision-making, and emergency management (among many others). 

Teams of rapidly deployable, resilience-focused researchers would leverage a proven feldwork 

technique especially suited to capturing ephemeral data on critical response and recover 

decision-making that assuredly has implication for resilience, but has yet to be studied through 

that lens to any signifcant degree.

Explore parallels to the environmental movement and a NEPA-like approach to 

considering resilience in all government activities.

For several symposium participants, conversations about the need to afect a cultural “sea 

change” toward an era of resilience evoked memories of the environmental movement of 

the 1960s. A popular uprising (“viva la resilience!?”) clearly has the potential to improve our 

collective recognition of risks, create political incentives for action, and spur agencies (and 

political jurisdictions and institutions of government) to work together in a more integrative 

fashion. Government funded outreach and resilience education eforts have begun, but how can 

we further a true uprising?

While the National Environmental Policy Act was more of a Congressional reaction to 

the environmental movement than a driver, a similar statute (and mindset) could create the very 
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widespread awareness and deliberation that is needed to break down the barriers to enhancing 

resilience and, ultimately, change our culture on the subject. [Name redacted] suggested just 

such an approach, which quickly piqued the interest and attention of many in attendance. As 

a procedural law, NEPA does not require the government to choose the most environmentally 

“friendly” course of action. It does, however, force policymakers to (publicly) acknowledge the 

environmental impacts of a given course of action. 

An analogous resilience-focused statute (or NEMA amendment?) would indeed cause a 

sea change. To the extent no “major” piece of infrastructure is built without some connection to 

federal funding, resilience would quickly need to be “baked in” to the design of all infrastructure 

proposals to ensure easier passage through any procedurally required resilience review. Such 

a regime would concurrently “feed” the education process across myriad sectors and industries 

– potentially making resilience a competitive endeavor – ultimately enhancing our likelihood of 

achieving a more integrative approach.

Alter existing regulatory schemes to better incentivize resilience investments.

By making “resilience” a specifc criterion for evaluating disaster recovery improvement 

grants, the federal grant process has been leveraged to ensure “smarter” reconstruction and 

mitigation eforts are underway. During one breakout session [name redacted] opined that 

the best paths to embrace with respect to incentives are the ones that already have traction. 

Following this logic, it makes sense to explore how the Staford Act itself might be refned to 

reduce or eliminate moral hazards and other disincentives for resilience investment. Ideally, the 

disaster relief fund could be leveraged to create incentives for better mapping and managing 

existing risks before the next catastrophe.

One proposal for doing so involves making disaster relief monies contingent on a 

jurisdiction efort’s to: (1) inventory and estimate the value of its public assets (in advance 

of a storm or attack); (2) phase in adoption of modern model building codes (instead of 

grandfathering buildings to older standards); and (3) secure insurance for that portion of a 

jurisdiction’s exposure that would not be covered by the Staford Act’s disaster relief formula 

(i.e., anything above 75% of the potential loss). This proposal appears to synthesize many of the 

points raised in the various incentives discussion and deserves further discussion.

Create a (trans-national) community of practice.

In closing the International Resilience Symposium, Dr. Flynn remarked how he could not help 

being invigorated by the breadth of engagement on the issue of resilience, and by the wide array 

of talent assembled at the event. Interestingly, the day before, [name redacted] observed that 

“outside of this [assembled resilience] community, not a lot of people understand what resilience 

is.” This comment, along with previously highlighted remarks concerning the importance of 
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trusted networks within and among communities, and statements concerning the need to better 

weave resilience throughout the cultural fabric of our lives, collectively underscore the necessity 

of widening the array of stakeholders and key players actively engaged in resilience research 

and discussions.

One important step toward doing so is better organizing the thought leaders, 

communities of scholars, practitioners, and other stakeholders who are already activity working 

on and thinking about these difcult issues. As an “emerging” feld of trans-disciplinary study, 

greater organization and collaboration will generate even more attention, interest, and inertia. 

Only through such eforts will more integrative analyses and solution be possible.

As the many insights recounted above attest, the International Resilience Symposium 

was a truly impressive event for what it was able to tease out of a diverse cross section of 

resilience experts in such a limited amount of time. While not an expressly stated goal for the 

event, the assembled participants efectively validated the barriers to resilience noted at its 

outset. Moreover, the thoughtful presentations and rich dialogue produced several important 

themes – complexity, community, culture, and communication – that can be used to further 

inform research, standards development, and policy initiatives going forward. Finally, the event 

yielded a number of promising tangible recommendations for action, as noted above. The 

author is extremely grateful to have been a part of this symposium, and for the opportunity to 

ofer this small contribution to it.

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