Modeling Wind-Induced Community Resilience Impacted by Broad Policy Levers

A well-designed resilience policy should be based on extensive risk assessment as well as a city’s experience with natural hazards. These policy decisions can significantly influence a community’s resilience to future hazards. An appropriate policy strategy can improve community resilience from a multidimensional perspective, which includes stability of the population, economy, and the social and physical systems. However, policies that can be implemented to resist and recover from natural hazard events are commonly presented qualitatively and not quantitively, making them difficult to model in emerging community or city-scale models. This study presents a broad policy portfolio that includes the most effective and widely used policies, their definitions, and an integrated policy portfolio to improve community resilience under different natural hazards. Then, an illustrative example examines community recovery for buildings subject to tornado hazard and quantitatively explores the impact of a series of policy scenarios on the recovery process using a state-of-the-art computational environment. The simulated policies in the broad policy portfolio for the illustrative example include land use and density change, residential building mitigation with and without socioeconomic equity, insurance incentives, and funding support. Future research will examine the impact of other typical policies applied in response to other natural hazards. The ability to simulate the implementation of broad policy levers for a community facing natural hazards can enable quantitative “what if” scenarios for policy planning or validate the impact of existing city policies already in place to provide decision support to local governments, public utilities and broader stakeholders.