Resilience Toolbox

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.

View case study

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

UCRA  

The Urban Community Resilience Assessment

The Urban Community Resilience Assessment (UCRA) helps cities incorporate individual and community capacities—social cohesion, familiarity with local climate risks, early warning systems and disaster readiness—into broader urban resilience evaluations. By analysing these local capabilities, the UCRA provides a snapshot of preparedness behaviours, risk perception and the strength of neighbourhood relationships. These findings enable individuals to identify context-specific adaptation actions and allow policymakers to engage community members in urban resilience planning.

Developed by
World Resources Institute (WRI) and Cities Alliance

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)

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

The IS Rating Scheme  

The IS Rating Scheme by Infrastructure Sustainability Council of Australia

The IS Rating Scheme (IS) is Australia and New Zealand’s only comprehensive rating system for evaluating sustainability across planning, design, construction and operation of all phases of infrastructure programs, projects, networks and assets.

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Developed by
ISCA

Reliability Workbench  

Reliability Workbench is Isograph’’s flagship suite of reliability, safety and maintainability software. You can use Reliability Workbench to display which maintenance or design changes will improve system reliability, predict the reliability of systems and create maintenance plans accordingly. The custom built report designer allows you to create reports with any amount of detail, high level right down to component specific information. Add a whole new level of detail to your system reliability presentations. The Enterprise edition of Reliability Workbench allows collaboration between colleagues on projects. Limit access to projects and folders to appropriate users and allow managers to approve or reject changes to projects with version control.

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Developed by
Isograph

Open Data for Resilience Index  

Open Data for Resilience Index (Beta)

The Open Data for Resilience Index is a tool to identify, assess and compare, for any country, the availability and ease of use of datasets that are considered to be key for disaster risk management. Anyone can submit a dataset. The result is a crowdsourced-database providing the state of open data for diaster risk management for any country.

Developed by
GFDRR

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

REDi  

Resilience-based Earthquake Design Initiative

The REDi Rating System is developed by Arups Advanced Technology and Research team, it proposes a framework for owners, architects, and engineers to implement ‘resilience-based earthquake design’ to new development. It describes design and planning criteria to enable owners to resume business operations and provide liveable conditions quickly after an earthquake, according to their desired resilience objectives. It also presents a loss evaluation methodology for assessing the success of the adopted design and planning measures in meeting the resilience objectives.

Developed by
Arup

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.

World Bank Climate & Disaster Risk Screening Tools  

Self-assessment tools provide a systematic, consistent, and transparent way of considering short- and long-term climate and disaster risks in project and national/sector planning processes. The tools target a range of sectors (both national/ policy and project levels): national plans, agricultural, coastal flood protection, energy, health, roads, water, etc.

Developed by
World Bank

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

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.

View case study

Developed by
Climate Central

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

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

CB-Cities  

Berkeley group is actively developing such a large-scale and high-fidelity traffic simulation model for several big cities around the world. It builds upon the concept of Agent Based Modelling (ABM), where individual citizens are represented by intelligent agents. An agent is capable of navigating in a graph representation of the city’s road network along an optimum path, while maintaining interactions with other agents and dynamically re-planning the route in response to traffic congestion or road closures. The model can accommodate millions of agents and run simulations as in real time.

Developed by
Berkeley Engineering

SmartScan  

The SuRe SmartScan contributes to action items addressing two challenges (Capital Investment Planning Poor, and/or Non Climate-Smart, Local Development Planning Poor, including Resilience) of the City Creditworthiness Self-Assessment & Action Planning Toolkit of the World Bank.

Increase your infrastructure project’s attractiveness to investors in only a few steps. The GIB SmartScan allows you to assess your projects based on its Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues and helps to efficiently flag risks and opportunities for improvements of your project. This process helps you to identify and therefore eliminate risks and to improve the ESG aspects of the assessed project, which is increasingly a mandatory consideration for investors in their investment decisions.

Developed by
Global Infrastructure Basel

CWRA  

City Water Resilience Approach

The City Water Resilience Approach (CWRA) responds to a demand for innovative approaches and tools that help cities build water resilience at the urban scale. The CWRA was developed to help cities grow their capacity to provide high quality water resources for all residents, to protect them from water-related hazards, and to connect them through water-based transportation networks (“provide, protect, connect”).

The approach is the result of fieldwork and desk research, collaborative partnerships with subject matter experts, and direct engagement with city partners. Based on this research, the CWRA outlines a process for developing urban water resilience, and provides a suite of tools to help cities grow their capacity to survive and thrive in the face of water-related shocks and stresses. The approach details five steps to guide cities through initial stakeholder engagement and baseline assessment, through action planning, implementation and monitoring of new initiatives that build water resilience.

Developed by
The Resilience Shift

PCVA  

Participatory Capacity and Vulnerability Analysis

Oxfam’s participatory capacity and vulnerability analysis (PCVA) tool is a risk analysis process designed to help staff and partner organisations engage with communities in contexts where natural disasters are significant drivers of poverty and suffering. PCVA has its roots in two proven social development methodologies. First, it stems from capacity and vulnerability analysis (CVA) methodology. This has long enabled development and humanitarian aid workers to design programmes based on a community’s capacities as well as its vulnerabilities. It recognises that vulnerable people have capacities to cope with adversity and can take steps to improve their lives, however difficult their situation may be. Second, it is rooted in the belief that enabling communities to genuinely participate in programme design, planning, and management leads to increased ownership, accountability and impact, and is the best way to bring about change. PCVA draws on a wide range of participatory learning and action (PLA) techniques and tools that are designed to channel participants’ ideas and efforts into a structured process of analysis, learning, and action planning, with the overall aim of reducing a community’s disaster risk.

Developed by
Oxfam