2

Approaches to Applied Research Priorities

The statement of task includes a charge to this committee to produce a consensus report identifying the priority applied research approaches, information, and expertise needed to encourage and stimulate emerging opportunities within the fields of natural hazard mitigation and resilience. Based on insights from the Resilient America Roundtable, input from the workshop’s keynote speakers and panelists, and the committee members’ knowledge and experiences with natural hazard mitigation and resilience, the committee identified the following approaches to addressing applied research priorities for preparing for and responding to compounding and cascading disasters:

1. Defining the problem—drivers, systems, and relationships that impact understanding of compounding and cascading disasters.
2. Mitigating impacts—developing solutions and avoiding unintended consequences.
3. Effectively implementing solutions and strategies, and governance for those solutions and strategies.

The examples presented in Boxes 2-1 and 2-2 illustrate how these three approaches work together as a process to generate solutions that communities can implement to increase their resilience for future events. The sections following the two boxes discuss each of these priority applied research approaches in detail. At the end of the discussion of each approach, the committee includes specific applied research topics and questions that it considers important for advancing related priorities.

DEFINING THE PROBLEM: DIAGONOSING DRIVERS, SYSTEMS, AND RELATIONSHIPS THAT IMPACT UNDERSTANDING

Creating appropriate solutions for the challenges linked to compounding and cascading disasters requires diagnosing the drivers, systems, and relationships that underlie the vulnerabilities and impacts on lives, livelihoods, and ecosystems. The workshop panelists and participants highlighted the following:

• the need to identify possible distinctive signatures to recurring acute disasters and their impacts upon human use systems and ecosystems (Machlis et al., 2022; Raymond et al., 2020);
• the importance of analyzing past events and their impact on current and future preparedness, response, and recovery (Bourque, 2013; Mishra and Suar, 2007; Sun and Xue, 2020);
• the need to explore if and when future disasters will compound as a result of climate change (Fink and Ajibade, 2022; Zscheischler et al., 2018); and

• the need for effective approaches for preparedness and mitigation that account for legacy stressors, such as those related to economic characteristics and social marginalization (Emrich et al., 2014; Kruczkiewicz et al., 2021).

The workshop speakers and participants also called for efforts to study these events through a different lens, one that focuses on impacts rather than specific events and requires public participation and additional expertise from disciplines such as economics, sociology, communication, biology, and others. Examining the broad impacts of compounding and cascading events from the bottom up (e.g., outcomes from previous events) could generate new perspectives on how to effectively mitigate these growing threats and may also illuminate critical pathways forward. To support addressing these shortcomings, applied research should include research into community stakeholder understanding, socially accepted data for decisions, and defining and building investment options that minimize compounding disasters, which in turn will require applied research in the following areas:

• Measuring, understanding, and enhancing baseline infrastructure resilience and readiness by community. For example, research is needed to anticipate and measure vulnerabilities to cascading global events, such as when the combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine created supply chain disruptions that affected oil and gas markets, food supply, and computer chip shortages, ultimately creating food insecurity and increased fuel and power costs in rural communities. Though these two events (COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine) were not weather-related disasters, their ongoing cascading effects have led to long-term resilience challenges.
• Better understanding how communities accept information and support decisions based on trusted data.
• Understanding how broken supply chains can starve isolated and rural communities of basic necessities.
• Understanding how system-of-systems effects impact community apathy toward preparing for a wide variety of events, including those that do not rise to the level of disaster.
• Identifying more “ready-for-practice” scientific guidance on compound probabilities to establish credible methods and compare against adaptive strategies.

The committee identified the following specific applied research questions:

Applied Research Questions to Help Define Problems Regarding Compounding and Cascading Events

• Are there distinct signatures left by recurring acute disasters and their impact on human ecosystems?

• What additional knowledge would we gain by switching from an event-specific research approach to an impact-specific research approach?
• How can better identification and characterization of cascading events contribute to more effective design of solutions?
• How have smaller historic disasters contributed to subsequent events?
• How do global mitigating events or cascading events create supply chain disruptions that impact oil and gas, food supply, and computer chip shortages, which ultimately create food insecurity and increase fuel and power costs in rural communities?
• What long-term resilience problems do ongoing cascading events generate?
• How can we evaluate the trade-offs between exposure thresholds, such as extreme heat versus poor air quality exposure?
• What information is needed to evaluate the trade-offs between preparation and response?
• How can long-term observation of disaster hot spots provide empirically based evidence that can help develop lessons learned and unlearned?

To help answer the applied research questions listed above, the research community could take the following steps (Wahl, 2018):

• Identify additional key variables and event combinations needing scrutiny.
• Use bottom-up approaches and perform system stress tests to identify vulnerabilities.
• Use appropriate statistical methods to simulate dependence in time (i.e., temporal clustering) and space (i.e., spatial footprints), and across multiple variables.
• Identify data and model requirements for documenting, understanding, simulating, and attributing compound events.
• Incorporate compound events into impact assessments and disaster risk mitigation planning.

As Wahl notes, this can be accomplished only through close collaboration and communication among scientists from various fields in the natural sciences, engineering, and social sciences, as well as stakeholders and policy makers.

MITIGATING IMPACTS: DEVELOPING SOLUTIONS AND AVOIDING UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

For the second approach, the committee identified three topics—(1) the built environment, (2) response and recovery of systems, and (3) incentives for disaster risk reduction and equity—that would benefit from new knowledge for advancing efforts to mitigate the impacts of compounding and cascading events.

The Built Environment

Current infrastructure design typically incorporates mitigation and resilience needs based on historical event probabilities and impacts. Infrastructure design considers all potential natural hazards based on design requirements in codes and standards. However, buildings, bridges, roads, and other infrastructure design rarely accounts for multiple compounding hazards or future climate effects. Further research and modeling is needed to better design infrastructure to be less vulnerable and more resilient to multiple hazards, such as natural hazards, climate effects, and pandemics, and in various contexts. Initial studies in this area have produced some promising outcomes, demonstrating for example that optimizing hospital operation in the face of compound wildfires and COVID-19 pandemic stressors can improve resource allocation and patient outcomes (Hassan and Mahmoud, 2021). In addition, since land use and population growth assumptions can significantly affect the outcomes of hazard events (Siders, 2022), there is a need to better understand the interaction of compound events with land use and population growth, as well as the interaction between humans and the built environment.

While new construction can address hazards outside of typical design practice with minimal additional cost, much of the existing infrastructure has been designed to earlier codes and standards, or possibly without codes and standards. This aging infrastructure has highly variable levels of maintenance and often underperforms in the face of extreme events.¹ Opportunities exist to employ individual mitigation tactics and strategies to address cascading events, such as strengthening existing buildings and infrastructure to withstand increased storm surge due to sea level rise or a tsunami following an earthquake event, although the costs can be significant. However, even the best designs and mitigation tactics and strategies will do little if communities do not enforce building codes and standards. Opportunities are also available to improve business continuity by strengthening post-disaster resilience in the face of multiple or compound events, such as by stockpiling critical materials and relocating operations to less vulnerable locations (Dormady et al., 2022).

At present, there is no universal agreement on appropriate metrics for community resilience, although significant work is underway (Cutter et al., 2003; Ellingwood et al., 2019; Loerzel and Dillard, 2021; Sherrieb et al., 2010). There is some general consensus on what factors or aspects should be included among community resilience metrics, such as population impacts (dislocation, housing status, strength of social networks); economics (employment, income); equity (income distribution, poverty); social services (public health, education, commerce); physical services (utilities, transportation); and governance (first responder access, essential services). Further research is needed in this area to develop, estimate, and validate community resilience metrics. Such metrics can help better inform benefit-cost analyses and the design of incentives to support resilience, as discussed further below.

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¹ The American Society of Civil Engineers (2022) has estimated an infrastructure funding gap of $10 trillion in gross domestic product by 2039.

Response and Recovery of Systems

There is a lack of understanding and modeling of the interconnectedness of various systems and impacts of multiple events on different components of a system. Often, there is also a lack of clarity regarding who has access to data about how systems and infrastructure are connected. This extends, for example, to international supply chains, where state-of-the-art economic models, such as the Global Trade Analysis Project,² are powerful but not yet capable of adequately and accurately estimating the effects of supply chain bottlenecks and supply delays that can lead to both lost production and inflation (Rose et al., 2022). An inability to produce needed goods and services due to property damage or infrastructure disruptions results in canceling orders for inputs from successive chains of suppliers upstream and a failure to provide inputs to successive downstream customers. These suppliers and customers likely extend far beyond the geographic area directly affected by the initial disaster. Moreover, delayed production due to supply chain bottlenecks and other sources of deterioration of synchronicity may extend the disaster.

As a second example, disasters can also have significant impacts on communication systems, damaging their ability to provide early warnings for a subsequent extreme event or to get critical information to the affected populations. For example, if communication systems are inoperable during a flood, people can have a difficult time getting the information they need to weigh the trade-offs between evacuating to a shelter and facing risk of exposure to COVID-19 at that shelter.

Incentives for Disaster Risk Reduction and Equity

In many circumstances, individuals and businesses can be counted on to make decisions that are consistent with both their best interests and the sound allocation of resources. Disasters, however, are major exceptions for reasons that include their infrequency and uncertainty, misperceptions of vulnerability, lack of access to information, inability or unwillingness to take a proper long-term perspective, and the divergence of objectives between parties of interest (Kunreuther and Pauly, 2004). Underresourced populations and communities may also lack access to capital to support resilience investments. Most of these considerations fall into what economists refer to as “market failure,” when the ordinary workings of demand and supply fail to allocate resources efficiently (Boardman et al., 2018). Remedies typically fall into two categories: government involvement or market strengthening. The former includes taxes or subsidies to incentivize appropriate behavior, such as carbon taxes or subsidies for rooftop solar systems, or even government provision of the good or service itself, as is the case with flood insurance. Market strengthening includes providing information to improve decision making, such as more accurate weather forecasts, higher-resolution flood and earthquake mapping, or the establishment of an emissions trading (“cap and trade”) system for addressing greenhouse gas emissions.

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² See https://www.gtap.agecon.purdue.edu.

Incentives and programs are frequently designed using benefit-cost analyses to allocate funding and support. While efficiency and benefit-cost analysis are important in evaluating mitigation and resilience tactics and strategies, other considerations, such as broader societal and environmental factors, are often omitted from these analyses. Such analyses should account for historic inequities, such as ensuring that a wealthier home is not preferentially protected over a lower-income home simply because the wealthier home has a higher property value (see Box 2-3). This new form of analysis should consider approaches to including a broader set of benefits, such as in the triple-dividend of resilience (NASEM, 2022; Surminski et al., 2016). In addition, disaster preparation and response strategies have pros and cons, which communities can perceive differently. For example, some communities build seawalls because they feel safer behind them, while other communities prefer open coastlines (Siders, 2022). Comprehensive benefit-cost analyses in these communities may vary based on their local values and priorities.

In parallel, while many extol the virtue of free markets for their ability to promote the efficient allocation of resources, nearly everyone agrees that the market is “blind to equity” in that it cannot ensure equitable outcomes even under the best of circumstances. Moreover, inequities are especially rife in disaster contexts; many studies have shown that members of underrepresented groups bear a disproportionate burden of negative disaster impacts.³ In such cases, policy can be developed to help reduce these inequities. An example is policy instruments focused on incentives, such as subsidies intended to help those households and businesses that cannot afford to take adequate protective measures or that have difficulty recovering. In addition, where there is a split-incentive issue between property owners, who are relatively more well-to-do, and renters, who are less so, remedies can include providing financial incentives to one or the other party—though a consideration of equity is likely to favor the latter (Kousky and Kunreuther, 2014).

Extensive literature is available on such failures of the market to allocate resources efficiently and equitably, and many studies have explored remedies. Building on existing knowledge, future research should focus on identifying entirely new approaches to addressing new phenomena, such as climate change impacts and compounding and cascading disasters. Such approaches may include both improved mechanisms for incorporating widespread societal benefits and approaches to valuing these benefits—and the distribution of benefits—into the design of various interventions, as well as strategies to use incentives to address market failures. This can serve as the basis for the specification of remedial policy instruments. Prime examples include research on the cost-effectiveness of incentives, such as improved earthquake- and landslide-mapping insurance rates and subsidies. Note that subsidies need not be for the entire cost of the action, but simply set at amounts necessary to close the gap between private and socially desirable outcomes (Rose, 2016). A new type of incentive uses the concept of “nudges” that take the form of suggestions or positive reinforcement to address long-standing issues such

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³ Ironically, a major exception is sea level rise, which is having a disproportionate impact on relatively expensive beachfront property. The burden is not only on individual households and businesses, but also on government at the regional and national level, with regard to commercial seaport operations and naval bases, respectively.

as low uptake of disaster insurance (Thaler and Sunstein, 2009). More research is needed on applying this nonmonetary policy instrument to disaster risk reduction (Karver et al., 2022; Robinson et al., 2021).

Businesses have many options for reducing the impacts of a disaster on employment and economic activity, including implementing a range of cost-effective resilience tactics in response to critical input disruptions caused by damaged infrastructure, such as conserving water and electricity, utilizing backup electricity generators, using stored water, and relocating activity to places where services are available (Dormady et al., 2022). Most of these tactics are applicable to compound and cascading hazard events, though they are likely to be more constrained (e.g., inventories, stockpiles). Many businesses are likely to implement them on their own accord for the purpose of survival, and limited government involvement in the form of inducements is necessary, although the government can help by removing obstacles to implementation. Some minority-owned businesses, small businesses, and microbusinesses⁴ may require inducements when they have limited access capital, and the lack of availability of government assistance, in the case of compounding and cascading hazard events because of event severity and duration.

Applied Research Questions to Help Develop Solutions and Avoid Unintended Consequences

Built Environment

• How do we better model the impacts of compounding and cascading events on infrastructure, and how can we increase infrastructure resilience by incorporating these models into engineering and design?
• How do human–infrastructure interactions and decision making affect outcomes in the face of compounding and cascading events?
• How do land use and population growth assumptions influence resilient infrastructure planning decisions to address compounding and cascading events?
• How can we design solutions knowing that all future disasters may be compound because of climate change?

Systems and Populations

• How can community infrastructure stakeholders mitigate compounding and cascading hazards and attract investment?
• How can readiness strategies be adapted to a new normal of multiple compounding hazards?
• How can business continuity and general recovery strategies be improved to cope with this new normal?
• How can we improve inventory strategies (e.g., “just-in-time”) to better smooth out supply chain bottlenecks?

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⁴ Microbusinesses are a subcategory of small businesses that employ fewer than 10 people (see https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf22309).

• How do we create a more coherent and collectively agreed-upon understanding of human adaptive capacity and incorporate this into planning?
• What are the tools needed to provide ground truth screening that better characterizes risks and vulnerabilities (inclusive of identifying data and indicators) to evaluate disproportionate impacts and recovery for underresourced communities?
• What tools most effectively map the interdependency of institutions, infrastructure, and systems, and integrate this interdependency into approaches to hazard response (e.g., inclusion in standard Enterprise Asset Management practice)?
• How effective are early warning systems and other communication strategies for reducing injuries and loss of life in the face of multiple hazards?
• What are potential unintended consequences of mitigation and adaptation decisions, such as managed retreat and how do we understand these? Particularly in contexts of low trust in institutions because of historic inequities. Important examples include

– populations in which family wealth is low because of systemic lack of economic and education opportunities;

– communities in marginal development areas most impacted by extreme events, in which physical vulnerabilities are hardwired; and

– Indigenous communities that resist relocation because it obliterates historical legacies.

• How do we account for personal and community crises, such as mental health crises during the pandemic, to better design solutions?
• What tools can be used to better measure disaster recovery time?
• How are underresourced communities that have not fully recovered from previous events able to prepare for or recover from successive events, including not only infrastructure, but also social and emotional damage?
• What are the impacts of land use and population growth on compounding and cascading event preparation and response?

Benefit-Cost Analysis, Other Assessment Methods, Incentives, Metrics, and Equity

• What methods could most efficiently improve or replace benefit-cost analysis—which is currently biased toward evaluating impacts on aggregate property values—to put equity at the forefront by focusing on the distribution of benefits and costs and protecting people in addition to property and income?
• To what extent can and should researchers measure the impacts of prior policy decisions and such factors as home values as a means of accounting for systemic racism?
• To what extent do various market failures take place in the context of disasters; what are the inequitable outcomes of market operation; and how do we design strategies

for closing the gap between typical outcomes and those in the best interest of a climate-resilient society (Rose, 2016)?

• To what extent does government policy promote or interfere with private-sector initiatives (Kousky and Kunreuther, 2014)?
• How do we reach consensus on key metrics, supported by sensitivity and validation studies, to better understand and articulate how to better reduce loss of lives and livelihoods, and how can these metrics be used to better inform government spending, planning, and philanthropy?
• What trade-offs do communities face when preparing for and responding to hazards?

– How do communities perceive trade-offs and how does that affect adaptation pathways (e.g., seawalls vs. beach access)?

– What are the trade-offs between exposure thresholds (e.g., extreme heat vs. poor air quality)?

• How do we apply measurement systems for weighing decisions about specific solutions and their trade-offs?

EFFECTIVELY IMPLEMENTING SOLUTIONS AND STRATEGIES, AND GOVERNANCE FOR THOSE SOLUTIONS AND STRATEGIES

Great relationships are the foundation for successful interactions in daily business. This is particularly true for emergency response situations, in which sudden needs arise from an unexpected event (see Box 2-4) to interact with many partners that are not part of daily operations. As such, it would likely improve a community’s response to an emergency if procedures for collaboration were in place prior to the emergency. The challenge, then, is to develop mechanisms for efficient coordination between government entities, public utilities, private stakeholders, and nongovernmental organizations that improve communication and minimize barriers to coordination.

To understand governance challenges, the following scenario can provide helpful context: For an earthquake event along the Wasatch Fault near Salt Lake City, Utah, an integrated approach to planning, response, and recovery would require coordination across two counties, 49 cities, many municipal service districts, multiple private power companies, state and federal agencies, private stakeholders, and community members. Each entity will have varying goals, economic incentives, time horizons, risk tolerances, and administrative capacities, and each will have distinct roles, priorities, responsibilities, and authorities (French, 2022).

The national emergency management system provides vertical integration among federal, state, and local governments for disaster assistance and funds. However, at the local, regional, and state levels, there is a lack of similar vertical integration of other offices for economic development, land use planning, climate change, and resilience. Moreover, there is often a lack of horizontal integration among these offices at the community, regional, and state levels. Such gaps are made more apparent by compounding and cascading hazard events.

One of the most important elements of effective recovery after a disaster is the availability to access funding to support recovery and advance resilience. In fact, the absence of sufficient financial resources at the individual, community, municipality, and state levels is itself a measure of vulnerability. Effective implementation of both disaster recovery and resilience measures will require coordination among available sources of funding, which are mostly public but sometimes philanthropic. Governance solutions and strategies should integrate these considerations as well.

Well-established methods for building collaboration and improving operations include broad interagency participation in hazard scenario exercises. These exercises also help prepare for compound or cascading events. However, as such exercises tend to focus on emergency response for a single hazard, they may not simulate the combined resilience requirements of single assets, the broader communities, and the systems of services such as health care, water systems, and education, among others. In addition, communities already burdened with patterns of historic disinvestment and abuse may require tailored emergency response and recovery efforts focused on all aspects of community resilience.

Nonetheless, there is much to learn about interagency collaborations and processes from such hazard scenario exercises if they are designed comprehensively. For example, Oregon used the 2018 solar eclipse—when a million people, the equivalent of 25 percent of its population, visited the state—to test preparations for a Cascadia earthquake response as a live exercise. Many response actions easily translate across hazards, and practicing them in a nonemergency situation can foster working together and developing relationships. State and local governments may consider going beyond emergency response situations by simulating recovery scenarios over short (days), intermediate (weeks to months), and long (months to years) terms (FEMA, 2011). For example, exercises that simulate planning and implementing incentives to repair and rebuild after a damaging event would inform emergency response and resilience plans among local and state governments and organizations.

One of the major factors that curbs planning and response activities is the limited bandwidth and staff capacities in many communities and states. The level of coordination and maintenance for preparedness, response, and recovery for hazard events is a huge challenge for many communities and states. Strategies for addressing this challenge include rural counties collaborating to support small, underserved communities, and states helping counties and municipalities as they apply for and manage grants.

The committee identified three topics that would benefit from new knowledge for advancing efforts to effectively implement solutions and strategies, and governance for those solutions and strategies: (1) leveraging funds and creating incentives through financial instruments, (2) expanding governance perspectives and strategies, and (3) obtaining governance knowledge and tools for implementing solutions and strategies.

Leveraging Funds and Creating Incentives Through Financial Instruments

Successful investment in climate adaptation and resilience requires long-term planning, institutional capacity, capital investment, and well-designed financial incentives to accelerate voluntary actions. Investment dollars may come from public sources, including those from federal and state agencies, through public-sector bond issuances (e.g., municipal bonds), or from private sources, such as banks or infrastructure funds, and in some cases from philanthropic sources such as foundations and family offices. Public–private partnerships (PPPs) offer a useful funding model for infrastructure construction or renovation. The National Council for Public-Private Partnerships defines a public-private partnership as

Each of these funding models has its own benefits and drawbacks. PPPs offer an effective way for both public and private investors to share and bear different types of financial risk within a transaction. However, communities commonly use multiple types of funding sources and mechanisms to achieve their resilience goals.

Federal and state programs that support resilience often contain important incentives, such as tax credits, guarantee mechanisms, rebates, and other financial mechanisms that help to catalyze resilient investment. These can span many sectors, agencies, and departments across federal and state governments. A number of federal programs have funds to help states and communities improve the current state of their infrastructure (ASCE, 2021) and resilience needs (Olszewski et al., 2021). As of December 2021, 20 federal agencies administered 75 funding programs related to climate adaptation and resilience, providing hundreds of millions of dollars

in grants, low-cost loans, and nonmonetary technical assistance (Climate Finance Advisors, 2022). Examples include the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,⁵ hazard mitigation grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), such as the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program,⁶ and Department of Housing and Urban Development Community Development Block Disaster Recovery and Mitigation Program grants.⁷

However, there can be a significant gap between available funds and a community’s capacity to apply, manage, and implement multiple funding streams with their varying timelines and application and management requirements. Federal mitigation and recovery programs are often too complex and cumbersome for most communities to implement (Sprayberry, 2022). The difficult, time-consuming nature of navigating various websites, understanding specific program priorities, and determining eligibility requirements can be a barrier for applicants—especially those without prior experience accessing federal programs. Communities need to be agile and deft to manage the timing of various grants, which can be received years after the damaging event.

Mandates and incentive programs can be key aspects of implementing solutions that will improve the resilience of communities to all hazards, including compounding and cascading hazards.⁸ The FEMA Community Rating System, for example, is a voluntary incentive program for encouraging floodplain management practices that is used by over 1,500 communities (FEMA, 2018). Programs such as this also present an opportunity to improve coordination at all levels to advance preparedness, recovery, and resilience programs.

While local communities best understand their challenges and needs, grant funding applications often have narrowly focused requirements that may not align with local priorities. Models of improved local, regional, and state coordination for better management and leveraging of funds are needed, as is localized expertise across communities whose sole purpose is to identify, understand, and procure federal and state funding for resilience. For example, when North Carolina was responding to challenges following hurricanes Matthew and Irma, it established a grants and incentives program to aid their communities with applying for and managing federal and state funds.⁵ In 2022, Maryland passed legislation establishing a statewide Office of Resilience with a chief resilience officer to coordinate state and local efforts to build resilience to risks identified in the Maryland Hazard Mitigation Plan, and to develop a state resilience strategy including an investment plan to fund the strategy.

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⁵Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, Public Law 58, 117th Congress, 1st session (November 15, 2021).

⁶ See https://www.fema.gov/grants/mitigation/building-resilient-infrastructure-communities.

⁷ See https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/fair_housing_equal_opp/fheo_requirementsfor_community_development_block_grant_%E2%80%93.

⁸ The National Institute of Building Sciences has published examples of public and private incentives for building and infrastructure owners (Multi-Hazard Mitigation Council, 2020).

⁵ See https://www.nccommerce.com/grants-incentives.

Workshop speakers and participants suggested the following as possible ways to improve governance:

• Simplify funding and incentive programs; many are too complex with their application and management requirements.
• Fund more staff at the local and state levels to help coordinate resilience responses.
• Use clear language that all government officials can understand; for instance, discount rates for benefit-cost analyses are not generally understood.
• Find ways to have academia and private companies assist communities in developing effective approaches for governmental coordination and advancing resilience to future hazard events.
• Use grant funding to plan and exercise scenarios with intergovernmental coordination.
• Incorporate land use planning and more stringent building codes; BRIC requires use of the International Building Code and local Hazard Mitigation Plan.
• More guidance and assistance on how to plan for, compensate, and achieve parity for historically marginalized communities.
• Award funds to states and let states make awards to counties and municipalities.
• Dramatically shorten the time it takes to complete a property buyout; at present it can take up to 5 years.

Expanding Governance Perspectives and Strategies

Local and state governments are facing new challenges regarding how to balance acute hazards and chronic conditions, such as coastal hazard events with sea level rise and wildlife–urban interface fires with drought conditions. These combinations may lead to compounding and cascading hazards—such as landslides following a wildlife–urban interface fire, and earthquake events or wind and flood events that occur in succession before a region recovers from previous events. These new challenges raise issues about the current paradigm of readiness, emergency management, and resilience that are based on a one-event-at-a-time perspective. For example, what does governance look like with multiple event occurrences? What type of implementation and governance changes are needed at the federal, state, and local levels to shift from a single-event condition to multiple events?

Evolving issues, such as equity in the face of pandemics, supply chain disruptions, and climate effects, are pressing needs for government agencies that should be integrated into planning, health, emergency management, resilience, and other activities. Equity issues—including demographics; historical context and legacy conditions; the role of marginalized populations in maintaining infrastructure; and, most notably, what constitutes equity in the context of resilience—all need greater attention. These evolving issues often require immediate actions while the research community is still developing and refining the science and tools that would lead to better decisions. For officials used to working with slowly evolving parameters,

such as building codes and standards, decision making under increased uncertainty can be uncomfortable and stultifying. However, the alternative of doing nothing until science and tools are better established is unacceptable.

Communities need guidance on how to address new risks associated with climate effects and with compounding and cascading events, particularly where communities have a risk-averse approach. It can be uncomfortable to make decisions about resilience, especially when uncertainties about events and outcomes are greater than in the past. Guidance is needed that simply and clearly conveys that the risk of doing nothing is much greater than taking steps to improve resilience, even if corrections are needed along the way. The research literature addresses risk stances (risk averse, risk neutral, or risk tolerant) for businesses and organizations, but public and government decision makers require improved guidance.

Obtaining Governance Knowledge and Tools for Implementing Solutions and Strategies

Decision makers need data-informed information and tools and an understanding of their intended application, including how risk and uncertainty are addressed. A 2018 workshop addressing data, information, and tools needed for community resilience planning and decision making found that: (1) communities seek tools to develop plans, communicate with stakeholders, and track progress; (2) data standards would improve the accessibility of data and tool development; and (3) implementation requires identifying funding opportunities and evaluating the benefits and costs of proposed projects (McAllister et al., 2019).

Examples of useful tools include National Flood Insurance Program flood hazard maps and fire hazard maps for land use planning. Other tools include web-based systems the public can use to obtain flood (Dorman and Banerfee, 2016) or fire alerts.⁶ Various research groups are also developing tools to support resilience planning (Olszewski et al., 2021), including

• FEMA’s Hazus tool, a geographic information system–based desktop software tool that identifies areas with high risk for natural hazards and estimates physical, economic, and social impacts of earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and tsunamis⁷;
• the Center of Excellence for Risk-Based Community Resilience Planning’s Interdependent Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment (IN-CORE) program, which allows users to run scientific analyses that model the impact of natural hazards and resiliency against the impact on communities⁸;
• the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute’s Business Resilience Calculator (BRC)⁹; and

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⁶ See https://www.alertwildfire.org.

⁷ See https://www.fema.gov/flood-maps/products-tools/hazus.

⁸ See https://incore.ncsa.illinois.edu.

⁹ See https://resiliencecalculator.com.

• the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Community Resilience Planning Guide¹⁰ and Inventory of Community Resilience Indicators & Assessment Frameworks.¹¹

Tools for supporting risk assessment in underserved communities include

• the Environmental Protection Agency’s EJScreen, an environmental justice screening and mapping tool that combines environmental and demographic indicators in maps and reports,¹² and
• FEMA’s National Risk Index for Natural Hazards, an online mapping application that identifies communities most at risk for 18 natural hazards using county-level data.¹³

Rural communities have a different set of parameters that current data and tools often do not address. For example, community members may not have cell phone access, and the nearest neighbors may be miles away. Workshop speakers and participants noted that many states and communities are developing their own tools either because they did not understand how to apply existing tools or did not know they already existed. One key question that remains for all data and tools is how to verify and validate them.

Applied Research Questions Regarding Effectively Implementing Solutions and Strategies, and Governance Those Solutions and Strategies

Improving Institutional Operations

• How can coordination for mitigation, planning, and recovery from cascading events be streamlined for timely, effective operations among government entities, public utilities, private stakeholders, and nongovernmental organizations?
• How can communications among agencies and community members, both urban and rural, be improved for clarity, timeliness, and understanding, in terms of both providing early warnings and functioning under emergency conditions?
• What is the minimum capacity (staffing, funding, etc.) needed at the local and state levels to appropriately plan for resilience and effectively coordinate disaster recovery (e.g., improve governance)?

Leveraging Funds and Creating Incentives through Financial Instruments

• There is a significant gap between available federal funds and local capacity to apply, manage, and implement multiple funding streams with varying requirements. How

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¹⁰ See https://www.nist.gov/community-resilience/planning-guide.

¹¹ See https://www.nist.gov/community-resilience/assessment-products.

¹² See https://www.epa.gov/ejscreen.

¹³ See https://www.fema.gov/flood-maps/products-tools/national-risk-index.

can mitigation and recovery programs be made less complex and cumbersome? How can local and state agencies get the capacity (staffing and funds) needed to navigate the complex system of federal and state funding streams?

• What incentives and metrics can be used to improve coordination at the interagency and public and private levels?
• How effective are federal and state mandates and incentives for encouraging hazard mitigation and response planning?
• How should different funds be used to effectively coordinate among different actors? If the funding comes from one source, how should it be distributed?
• How can communities leverage federal funding more effectively (e.g., through bond issuances, to securitize private investment)?
• How can we better integrate resilience into solutions that are driven by funds, services, and connections provided by industry, government, and civil society?

Expanding Governance Perspectives and Strategies

• How can the federal and state mindset for acute events and emergency management be shifted to include long-term planning for compounding and cascading events?
• Should every state institute chief resilience officers to help coordinate at the local and federal levels?
• How can innovation be introduced and incorporated into risk-averse institutions?
• What evidentiary basis do social and behavioral sciences provide for improving implementation of disaster mitigation and resilience policies and strategies?
• How can consensus on adaptive capacities, especially in the context of compounding and cascading disasters, be developed to inform resilience solutions and strategies?
• How do we balance acute hazard events and chronic conditions, such as drought, from a governance perspective?
• How can governance roles and authorities be assigned more effectively among entities (federal, state, local; public–private)?
• How can government staff be trained to obtain new capabilities for future event resilience planning, response, and recovery?
• What does the governance transition look like when hazard events become so frequent that they have to be managed as status quo? Perhaps these are no longer “emergency” appropriations?

Obtaining Governance Knowledge and Tools for Implementing Solutions and Strategies

• What knowledge (data/information) is needed by decision makers and those that implement resilience solutions and strategies?
• How can this knowledge about implementation status (progress/vulnerabilities) be provided through current data/information and tools (assessments, indexes, indicators/metrics, etc.)?

• In particular, what knowledge and tools are available or needed to address equitable solutions?