Plan Adoption, Implementation, and Evaluation
After establishing the resilience plan, the next steps are to implement it, measure progress, and adjust it to ensure success.
Implement
To varying degrees, outputs of this regional collaboration will be integrated at the jurisdictional level. Examples of resilience plan or strategy adoption and institutionalization include:
- Strategy and project integrated in multistakeholder, cross-jurisdictional nonbinding plan for city and agency adoption
- Integration into local planning efforts (zoning/land use, comprehensive plan, potential current and future threat action/adaptation plan, energy plan, sustainability plan, and similar for guiding federal workplan/action plans
- Institutionalize the plan/concept of resilience through working groups, agreements, and funding/resource commitments between jurisdictions or between local governments and the state government.
An action plan can increase efficiency and accountability among stakeholders and track progress toward the desired end goals.
An action plan:
- Lays out the activity
- Describes the activity
- Estimates funding needs for implementation
- Identifies a responsible party
- Establishes a timeline.
Fund
At the state level, the opportunity presents itself to institutionalize resilience and associated resilience performance metrics as a requirement for state-funded local projects and programs. To some degree, jurisdictions can integrate resilience strategies into ongoing, long-term planning activities. This includes the development and enforcement of policies and regulations.
At the local level, resilience strategies could be integrated into planning policies and regulations regarding:
- Development agreements
- Density bonuses
- Cluster subdivisions
- Land acquisitions
- Overlay zoning
- Use-specific standards
- Point-of-sale disclosures.
As implementing strategies, programs and capital projects involving infrastructure and development will incur higher costs. To this end, identify external funding and public finance opportunities.
Potential Cost Savings From the Pre-Disaster Mitigation Program
This study, conducted by the United States Congressional Budget Office, suggests that for every $1 spent on resilience, losses from future disasters are reduced by $3.
Public-private partnerships have played an increasingly larger role in the development of infrastructure projects nationwide. The integration of resilience measures and outcomes must be driven by the jurisdiction or interjurisdictional partners during development agreement negotiations with private partners. These partnerships pose an opportunity for resilience to be integrated into a standard business/governmental transaction process.
It should be noted that the power generation asset typically remains in the ownership of a third party rather than by the public entity. Recent research completed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development documents the expanded leverage and impact that a public-private partnership yields.
Resilience can be integrated into a bond finance mechanism in a variety of methods, including:
- General obligation bonds for capital improvement on public facilities
- Housing bonds
- Low-income housing
- School construction bonds
- 501c(3) eligible bonds (such as nonprofit hospitals)
- Disaster or green bonds.
The nonprofit sector has developed new resilience-facing grant programs, including interest and funding from large philanthropies and foundations. In this space, The Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities is a flagship program featuring support for resilience planning and project implementation.
Increasingly, federal government grant programs address and fund resilience projects outright, incorporating scoring criteria for selection, such as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's National Disaster Resilience Competition. Anticipated effects of this trend indicate that agencies tied to critical infrastructure—such as the U.S. Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Energy—will be using resilience as a meter and requirement in the near future.
States also have the opportunity to develop innovative grant programs. These programs can support the deployment of certain technologies throughout a state as pilots and demonstration projects.
Evaluate
Using the performance goals established, stakeholders can assess the progress of the resilience strategy and evaluate its effectiveness.
No standard resilience metrics are in practice today. However, effective community resilience metrics should provide a means of evaluating how strategies and investment decisions are working toward the performance goals established during the planning, prioritizing, and implementations process. Determining the right criteria can help community leaders verify how resilient their community is and how the resilience plan is working.
NIST's Center for Risk-based Community Resilience Planning is conducting research and working with others to develop metrics and tools that support assessment of community resilience that account for life safety, functionality of buildings, and infrastructure systems during and after a disruptive hazard event. In the meantime, consider using meaningful assessment criteria, such as reducing the number of hours a critical facility is without power or increasing the number of access routes to a critical facility such as a hospital or community shelter. By prioritizing what is important to the region, the stakeholders, and a community, the metrics needed to measure success of resilience projects will become apparent.
Resources
Clean Energy Financial Institutions
Innovative Resilient Grant Program
Examples of Work Completed in the Finance and Funding Space
Leveraging Catastrophe Bonds — As a Mechanism for Resilient Infrastructure Finance
Returns on Resilience — The Business Case
Resilient Power: Financing for Clean, Resilient Power Solutions
Video
Heat Vulnerability and Resilience in Denver, NREL Resilience Video Challenge (produced by video contest winner)
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