Charting the Course to Community Resilience: How Science and Technology Shape the Future

Executive Summary

In recent years, America’s communities have faced unprecedented shocks and stresses due to natural hazards, accidents, and human-caused disruptions, some occurring in tandem or as cascading disasters. Helping individuals, families, and communities recover from these immense challenges while building their resilience to historical, ongoing, and future stressors is a challenge that requires a wholeof-community effort, which includes harnessing science, technology, and innovation. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law invests in addressing these challenges, including over $50 billion to build the nation’s resilience to the impacts of climate and extreme weather hazards, and directs investment in billions more in infrastructure that will need to be resilient to both natural and human-caused hazards.

To contribute to addressing the challenge of building resilience, the United States National Science and Technology Council’s (NSTC) Subcommittee on Resilience Science and Technology (SRST) establishes a Resilience Science and Technology Grand Pathways Framework in this report. This Framework uses a focus on strengthening specific societal dimensions of resilience to better identify, align, and prioritize investments in science and technology to improve community resilience. The report defines and examines the interdependencies among five societal dimensions of resilience: safety and security, financial/economic resilience, healthy people, social cohesion, and trusted effective governance. These societal dimensions are compared to cross-cutting enablers, defined as the enabling resources and capabilities (for example, education, infrastructure, financial resources, and policy) that build towards the end states of a resilient community. The Framework weaves together the societal dimensions and cross-cutting enablers with key functions of a resilient community, which are defined as actions or services (e.g., continuity of government, emergency response operations) that use cross-cutting enablers to support one or more societal dimensions. Ultimately, the Framework integrates societal dimensions, cross-cutting enablers, and key functions to identify the critical gaps that impede resilience and that can be addressed by the advancement and application of resilience science and technology.

The Grand Pathways Framework is intended to help users identify, align, and prioritize science and technology solutions to improve resilience. The Framework identifies three modes of resilience: the process of resilience (anticipating, avoiding, adapting, withstanding, and building back better), the property of resilience, and the desired outcomes of societal resilience. In applying the Framework, SRST encourages adopters to carefully consider the distinctions between and relationships among the crosscutting enablers, key functions, and societal dimensions of resilience.

Resilience is an ever-evolving challenge, as novel and unpredictable stressors continue to emerge, and historical and environmental factors influence the path to resilience. Resilience can be improved by investments in science and technology. The Grand Pathways Framework looks to support decisionmakers in achieving the goal of resilience by helping them design and implement multipurpose science and technology solutions that strengthen a community’s ability to withstand a wide variety of acute shocks and chronic stressors.