ASTM Standard Guide for Community Resilience Planning Published

Experts from NIST, other federal agencies, private industry and local governments have developed a first-of-its-kind ASTM standard that could help communities improve their ability to withstand and recover from disasters.

Standards exist to ensure that individual buildings and infrastructure systems stand up to hurricanes, earthquakes, fires or other hazards, but until now, there has not been a consensus-based standard that considers their impact on social systems and services on a community scale.

How do different structures depend on each other to provide essential services like health care, education and housing? How should we prioritize those buildings and infrastructure systems at a community level? The new standard, based on NIST’s Community Resilience Planning Guide, can help local governments answer these questions and many more.

The guide offers a step-by-step process for developing resilience plans and goals for recovery that can be tailored to the needs of individual communities and used without expert assistance.

For more on NIST’s community resilience efforts, visit nist.gov/community-resilience.