Resilience Toolbox

QRE  

Quick Risk Estimation tool

The Quick Risk Estimation tool is designed for the purposes of identifying and understanding current and future risk/ stress/ shocks and exposure threats to both human and physical assets. The QRE tool is not a full scale risk assessment, rather a multi-stakeholder engagement process to establish a common understanding. Taking into account the actions or corrective measures already undertaken, the QRE will produce a dashboard-style risk assessment advising the risks and hazard to human and physical assets, impacts of identified main risk and associated perils on the specified location and/or particular assets.

Developed by
UNISDR United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction

FHWA P3 Toolkit  

The Center for Innovative Finance Support provides information and expertise in the use of different P3 approaches. The P3 Toolkit includes analytical tools and guidance documents to assist in educating public sector policy-makers, legislative and executive staff, and transportation professionals in implementation of P3 projects. The P3 Toolkit forms the base of a broader P3 capacity-building program which includes a curriculum of courses and webinars. The P3 Toolkit addresses Federal requirements and four key areas of P3 implementation: Legislation and Policy; Planning and Evaluation; Procurement; Monitoring and Oversight.

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Developed by
U.S. Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration

WEDG  

Waterfront Edge Design Guidelines

WEDG employs an evidence-based approach, focusing on three key pillars of excellent waterfront design:

1. Resilience: Reduce risks or be adaptable to the effects of sea level rise and increased coastal flooding, through setbacks, structural protection, and other integrative landscaping measures.
2. Ecology: Protect existing aquatic habitats and use designs, materials, and shoreline configurations to improve the ecological function of the coastal zone, and strive to be consistent with regional ecological goals.
3. Access: Be equitable and informed by the community, enhancing public access, supporting a diversity of uses, from maritime, recreation, and commerce where appropriate, thereby maximizing the diversity of the harbour and waterfront.

Developed by
Waterfront Alliance

AdaptInfrastructure  

AdaptInfrastructure is the home of adaptation analysis. Here you get to drive the analysis according to different scenario settings you need. Test the effectiveness of adaptation options – from building with different materials, raising floor levels in a flood zone or increasing the design specifications in a wind zone.

Features are:

• Specify your inputs to refine your analysis
• Specify the time you want to apply each action, how much it will cost and which assets will be adapted
• Trial adaptation options to reduce the risk to your assets
• Compare the performance of adaptation pathways in terms of customers, cashflow, net present value and other KPIs
• Combine adaptation options to develop an optimal adaptation pathway

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Developed by
XDI Cross Dependency Initiative

XDIGlobe  

XDI Globe allows you to review your climate impact risks using a spatial interface, from a general area view down to an individual asset. This enables an easy overview, quickly highlighting areas at risk from each or all hazards.

Features are:

• See high risk areas at a glance
• Zoom in on individual assets to understand what they are and why they’re vulnerable
• Compare the same results through Asset View or Area View
• Identify relative impacts of each hazard
• View different times slices
• Interrogate individual assets for risk cost over time

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Developed by
XDI Cross Dependency Initiative

UrbanSim  

UrbanSim Modelling Methodology

UrbanSim leverages state-of-the-art urban simulation, 3D visualization, and shared open data to empower users to explore, gain insights into, and develop and evaluate alternative plans to improve their communities. UrbanSim is a simulation platform for supporting planning and analysis of urban development, incorporating the interactions between land use, transportation, the economy, and the environment.

Developed by
UrbanSim Inc.

SimCenter  

Computational Modeling and Simulation Center

The Computational Modeling and Simulation Center (SimCenter) provides next-generation computational modeling and simulation software tools, user support, and educational materials to the natural hazards engineering research community with the goal of advancing the nation’s capability to simulate the impact of natural hazards on structures, lifelines, and communities. In addition, the Center will enable leaders to make more informed decisions about the need for and effectiveness of potential mitigation strategies.

Developed by
The Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) program

OpenSees  

The Open System for Earthquake Engineering Simulation

A centerpiece of PEER’s program is new research on simulation models and computational methods to assess the performance of structural and geotechnical systems. Breaking the barriers of traditional methods and software development protocols, PEER has embarked on a completely new approach in the earthquake engineering community by developing an open-source, object-oriented software framework. OpenSees is a collection of modules to facilitate the implementation of models and simulation procedures for structural and geotechnical earthquake engineering. By shared development using well-designed software interfaces, the open-source approach has affected collaboration among a substantial community of developers and users within and outside of PEER. Unique among software for earthquake engineering, OpenSees allows integration of models of structures and soils to investigate challenging problems in soil-structure-foundation interaction. In addition to improved models for reinforced concrete structures, shallow and deep foundations, and liquefiable soils, OpenSees is designed to take advantage of the latest developments in databases, reliability methods, scientific visualization, and high-end computing.

Developed by
Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center

Climate Lens  

The Climate Lens is a horizontal requirement applicable to Infrastructure Canada’s Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program (ICIP), Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund (DMAF) and Smart Cities Challenge. It has two components the GHG mitigation assessment, which will measure the anticipated GHG emissions impact of an infrastructure project, and the climate change resilience assessment, which will employ a risk management approach to anticipate, prevent, withstand, respond to, and recover from a climate change related disruption or impact.

As part of the Investing in Canada plan, applicants seeking federal funding for new major public infrastructure projects will now be asked to undertake an assessment of how their projects will contribute to or reduce carbon pollution, and to consider climate change risks in the location, design, and planned operation of projects.

The Climate Lens will help infrastructure owners design better projects by assessing their opportunities to reduce carbon pollution and identify when they should be adapting project design to better withstand impacts of climate change (e.g. severe weather, floods, sea-level rise, etc.). A General Guidance document has been prepared to explain the required approach, define the scope of the assessment, and identify the specific information that must be submitted to Infrastructure Canada.

Developed by
Infrastructure Canada

Coastal Resilience  

Coastal Resilience is a global network of practitioners who are applying an approach and web-based mapping tool designed to help communities understand their vulnerability from coastal hazards, reduce their risk and determine the value of nature-based solutions.

Coastal Resilience is a program led by The nature Conservancy. It is an approach which includes a four step process to access and reduce ecological, socio-economic risks of coastal hazards. Through this approach they have developed planning methods, a decision support tool, and web apps that address specific coastal issues.

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Developed by
Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium and NOAA's Coastal Storms Program

DRSC  

Disaster Resilience Scorecard for Cities

The Scorecard provides a set of assessments that will allow local governments to monitor and review progress and challenges in the implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction: 2015-2030, and assess their disaster resilience. It is structured around UNISDR’s Ten Essentials for Making Cities Resilient.

Developed by
UNISDR United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction

Hazus  

Hazus is a nationally applicable standardized methodology that contains models for estimating potential losses from earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes. Hazus uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to estimate physical, economic, and social impacts of disasters. It graphically illustrates the limits of identified high-risk locations due to earthquake, hurricane, flood, and tsunami. Users can then visualize the spatial relationships between populations and other more Earthquake, Wind, Flood, Tsunami permanently fixed geographic assets or resources for the specific hazard being modelled, a crucial function in the pre-disaster planning process.

Hazus is used for mitigation and recovery, as well as preparedness and response. Government planners, GIS specialists, and emergency managers use Hazus to determine losses and the most beneficial mitigation approaches to take to minimize them. Hazus can be used in the assessment step in the mitigation planning process, which is the foundation for a community’s long-term strategy to reduce disaster losses and break the cycle of disaster damage, reconstruction, and repeated damage. Being ready will aid in recovery after a natural disaster.

Potential loss estimates analysed in Hazus include:

• Physical damage to residential and commercial buildings, schools, critical facilities, and infrastructure;
• Economic loss, including lost jobs, business interruptions, repair, and reconstruction costs;
  Social impacts, including estimates of shelter requirements, displaced households, and population exposed to scenario floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes, and tsunamis.
• As the number of Hazus users continues to increase, so do the types of uses. Increasingly, Hazus is being used by states and communities in support of risk assessments that perform economic loss scenarios for certain natural hazards and rapid needs assessments during hurricane response. Other communities are using Hazus to increase hazard awareness.

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Developed by
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)

Surging Seas  

Sea Level Rise and Extreme Sea Level Analysis Service

This app exposes information from global climate models combined with datasets on vertical land movement on a local level, and shows this with local population density information (which clearly shows the extend of coastal cities), offering opportunities for data presentation previously unavailable to a wider audience.

The extreme sea levels analysis tool includes the latest historical storm surge data for the globe, high tide events, and sea levels changes caused by lower atmospheric pressure and severe winds during storms in climate scenarios.

Aside from the SLR tool, there are other similar tools as part of the same tool developer that analyse other indicators such as climate change scenarios and baseline data generation, drought monitoring, heat index, etc.

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Developed by
Climate Central

EARTH EX  

EARTH EX simulates global-scale disruption, with long duration power outages and cascading failures of all other infrastructures. It offers executive and senior level operational decision makers the opportunity to review critical decision-making policies, processes, roles and responsibilities – essential to the success of all other response and recovery operations.

The exercise is designed for self-evaluation, with distributed play conducted using electronic tools, and local facilitation for feedback and execution.

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Developed by
Electric Infrastructure Security (EIS) Council

EDGe$  

Economic Decision Guide Software

NIST had created EDGe$, based on the process found in the Community Resilience Economic Decision Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems (EDG) and designed for use in conjunction with the NIST Community Resilience Planning Guide for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems (CRPG). EDGe$ is intended for community planners, resilience and budget officers, and the public.

The tool provides a transparent and flexible economic methodology based on best-practices for evaluating investment decisions aimed at improving the ability of communities to adapt to, withstand, and quickly recover from natural, technological, and human-caused disruptive events. The tool helps to identify and compare the relevant present and future resilience costs and benefits associated with new capital investment alternatives versus maintaining a community’s status-quo.

The case studies cited in the user manual are derived from the United States and the tool was developed with the United States context in mind.

Developed by
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Equitable Origin  

Equitable Origin Platform

Tool 1: EO100™ Standard for Responsible Energy Development

The EO100™ Standard for Responsible Energy Development provides a framework for implementing and verifying enhanced environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance, greater transparency, more accountability, and better outcomes for local stakeholders in energy development projects. The EO100™ Standard represents leading industry practices and references international standards for evaluating site-level ESG performance of energy and energy infrastructure projects.

The EO100™ Standard encompasses the following Principles:

• Corporate Governance, Transparency & Ethics
• Human Rights, Social Impact & Community Development
• Indigenous People’s Rights
• Fair Labor & Working Conditions
• Climate Change, Biodiversity & Environment

Tool 2: Equitable Origin Platform

The Equitable Origin (EO) Platform is a one-stop resource that provides energy companies, utilities, investors, and corporate power purchasers with essential tools to effectively implement and track due diligence and compliance within their operations, supply chains, and investment portfolios. The EO100™ Performance Assessment provides a quick, easy, and efficient way to measure the performance of energy and energy infrastructure projects and suppliers of energy against a comprehensive and customizable range of environmental, social and governance (ESG) indicators.

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Developed by
Equitable Origin

Resilence Atlas  

The Resilience Atlas was developed with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to identify where projects should take place and allow users to derive insights of their own based on data. The developers believed that policymakers and donors needed to know where problems were occurring to know where to make investments.

The Resilience Atlas is an interactive analytical tool for building:

1. Understanding of the extent and severity of some of the key stressors and shocks that are affecting rural livelihoods, production systems, and ecosystems in the Sahel, Horn of Africa and South and Southeast Asia;
2. Insights into the ways that different types of wealth and assets (i.e. natural capital, human capital, social capital, financial capital and manufactured capital) and combinations among these – impact resilience in particular contexts.

The tool is a web-based open source mapping platform.

To date, the tool has been used at the national level, but there are opportunities to use the data at a more localized level. Data is available for all countries. This tool is primarily used in places where capacity for remote sensing and GIS is lower. “

View case study

Developed by
Conservation International

Elephant Builder  

The Elephant Builder is Bellwether Collaboratory’s collaborative modeling tool for multi-stakeholder planning processes. Governments and nonprofits use the Elephant Builder to engage experts and community members in an authentically inclusive manner, as stakeholders build and analyze causal models of the community systems of interest.

The modeling process requires little training and can accommodate stakeholders across a broad range of technical sophistication and confidence: models are built node by node, the Elephant Builder asking simple cause-and-effect questions. Once the model is completed, the Elephant Builder guides stakeholders through the identification of causal pathways, system vulnerabilities, feedback loops, and recommended actions. Users can also parameterize the model with quantitative variable-states and probabilistic causal relationships, allowing the Elephant Builder to act as an AI-backed scenario-testing tool.

The Elephant Builder has been used to examine critical lifeline interdependencies in Los Angeles (Susanne Moser Research and Consulting and U.S. Geological Survey), food systems in New York state (SUNY Albany School of Public Health), and community resilience in Larimer County, Colorado (Larimer County Office of Emergency Management).

Developed by
Bellweather Collaboratory