Resilience Planning

What is Resiliency?

Resiliency is defined by the state of Colorado as “The ability of communities to rebound, positively adapt to, or thrive amidst changing conditions or challenges — including human-caused and natural disasters — and to maintain quality of life, healthy growth, durable systems, economic vitality, and conservation of resources for present and future generations.” [Link to Colorado House Bill 18-1394]

Resiliency planning is a tool to empower Colorado and its communities to successfully meet these challenges. Resiliency planning means looking holistically at the shocks and stresses that your community faces and working to implement creative solutions that will allow your community to adapt and thrive, even under challenging conditions.

Exercise and Health: A Useful Metaphor for Resilience Planning

Community members may ask, “what does resiliency mean to me?” Resilience scholars like Thomas Campanella and David Godschalk have used the metaphor of exercise and health to illustrate the concept. Like resiliency, there is no one “right” approach to exercise, but many possibilities to match different people and their circumstance. Exercise is an effective tool for managing chronic health stressors, like obesity and high blood pressure, and also for preventing health shocks like heart attacks. A person who exercises will be better prepared to manage unexpected health challenges if, and when, they occur. Lastly, exercise is an ongoing process rather than a one-off activity. Keeping fit through exercise requires a long-term commitment.

Just like exercise improves overall health and the management of crises, planning for resilience helps communities to prepare for shocks and stressors, and better manage unexpected events. Communities also need to see resilience as a value and mindset, rather than a one-off plan. That means that they will engage in planning for resilience on an ongoing and active basis, just like a healthy individual exercises regularly. For example, wildfire fuel mitigation around and within a community is a process that can help the homeowners overcome the unexpected shock of a wildfire.

How does resiliency planning differ from traditional approaches to disaster preparedness? Communities that plan for resilience strive to:

• Think holistically – resilient communities weave considerations of shocks and stresses across multiple sectors throughout all of their plans, policies and decision-making, rather than a single plan or department. The Colorado Resiliency Framework, for example, examines risks and vulnerabilities to shocks and stresses across six interconnected sectors: Community, Economic, Health and Social, Housing, Infrastructure, and Watersheds and Natural Resources.
• Collaborate – collaboration and partnership are essential for thriving in the face of complex social and environmental challenges. Local governments that plan for resilience encourage collaboration with diverse stakeholders in their communities to identify equitable solutions, and seek partnership and support from outside governments, agencies and organizations. Thorough and robust community engagement can help ensure that local governments are reaching socially vulnerable populations in their collaboration efforts.
• Embrace uncertainty – resilient communities proactively understand and plan for the shocks and stressors they will likely face. They also recognize that it is important to remain flexible and adaptable to uncertain future conditions, like the effects of climate change.
• Connect the dots – communities that plan for resilience consider the connections between everyday societal stressors and vulnerability to shocks like disasters.  

The Colorado Resiliency Office

The Colorado Resiliency Office (CRO), part of the Colorado Department of Local Affairs (DOLA) Division of Local Government, is a key partner and resource to help communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from disruptions and ongoing stressors. The office coordinates and collaborates across State agencies and with local, State, federal, private, and non-governmental partners to ensure that Colorado communities are resilient to, and can build back better after, disruptive events. The support the CRO provides includes helping communities understand vulnerabilities and risks, setting priorities, leveraging resources, providing transparent and clear communication, fostering community partnerships, and delivering measurable results.

The Terminology of Resilience Planning

As your community plans for resiliency, it is important that everyone understands a few key terms:

• Vulnerability: the predisposition to be adversely affected by hazards.
• Shock: an intense, acute event that can disrupt communities
• Stressor: an underlying long-term condition that can negatively impact a community’s environmental, social, and economic health
• Exposure: the presence of community assets (be that human life, infrastructure, ecosystems, or other assets) within an area that could be adversely affected by a hazard event.
• Sensitivity: the degree to which community systems, assets, or resources could be affected by hazards. Adaptive Capacity: The ability of a human or natural system to adjust to the hazard, take advantage of new opportunities resulting from the hazard, and/or coping with the change from the hazard

There is no one “right” way to do resiliency planning. Instead, resiliency planning means finding an approach that is best matched to your community’s unique needs and resources. The Colorado Resiliency Office offers a resiliency planning toolkit to assist your community with its planning efforts. The toolkit describes 6 steps to resiliency planning, each with a set of activities and resources:

Step 1: Get Started

The first step is to understand, define, and articulate your community’s roadmap in the resilience planning process.

• Activity 1: Assess Existing Community Plans, Select Your Resiliency Planning Approach, and Define Your Scope
• Activity 2: Form Your Core Resiliency Team
• Activity 3: Identify Who Needs to Be Involved
• Activity 4: Define Your Approach to Community Engagement

Step 2: Identify Shocks and Stressors and Gather Information

Next, you will identify the community’s concerns and gather the information that will help you to understand the challenges your community faces now and will likely face in the future.

• Activity 1: Gather Information About Current Conditions and Historical Trends
• Activity 2: Identify and Prioritize Community Concerns
• Activity 3: Gather Information About Future Changes to Your Community
• Activity 4: Establish Community Resiliency Vision, Goals, and Guiding Principles

Step 3: Assess Vulnerability and Understand Risk

In this step, you will determine what sectors, communities, resources, ecosystems, and community assets are most vulnerable to ongoing community stressors, projected changes to climate and extreme weather events, man-made and natural hazards, and other current and future shocks.

• Activity 1: Select Your Approach to Assessing Your Community’s Vulnerabilities and Risks
• Activity 2: Define Your Communities Vulnerability and Risk to Future Shocks and Stressors
• Activity 3: Summarize Your Findings

Step 4: Develop Resilience Strategies

In this step, you will brainstorm, develop, and prioritize resilience strategies to address the vulnerabilities and risks you identified in Step 3. It will also help you identify where and how to implement these actions or mainstream them into other specific planning efforts.  The application of individual actions will depend on the key concern being addressed, the sector the action applies to, and the existing planning efforts and resources available to the community.

• Activity 1: Reassess Priority Planning Focus and Goals
• Activity 2: Brainstorm Potential Resilience Strategies
• Activity 3: Evaluate and Assess Resilience Solutions
• Activity 4: Prioritize Resilience Strategies
• Activity 5: Integrate Resilience Strategies into Your Plan(s)
• Activity 6: Compile and Communicate Your Results

Step 5: Take Action

In this step, you will work with the core team, local and regional organizations, and municipal leadership to confirm buy-in, chart the path forward, and implement resilience strategies developed in Step 4.

• Activity 1: Articulate Your Roadmap to Resiliency
• Activity 2: Identify Potential Funding Avenues
• Activity 3: Convene a Community Resiliency Implementation Team
• Activity 4: Implement Resiliency Strategies

Step 6: Monitor, Evaluate and Adjust

In this step, you will assess whether or not the resilience strategies being implemented are currently meeting the community’s resilience vision and goals.

• Activity 1: Track Implementation of Resilience Strategies
• Activity 2: Evaluate Effectiveness of Resilience Strategies
• Activity 3: Assess and Integrate New Information When Appropriate
• Activity 4: Adjust Approach and Strategies Where Appropriate
• Activity 5: Revisit and Update Your Future Planning Needs

From a land-use perspective, resiliency planning means considering shocks and stresses throughout your community’s plans, land-use codes, zoning, development standards, incentive programs, and other plans or policies that guide and shape development. In that sense, the entire Planning for Hazards guide is designed to support your community’s resiliency planning. Here, we highlight a few key connections between land-use and resiliency planning:  

Integrate Resilience into the Comprehensive Plan

The comprehensive plan serves as the community’s long-term policy blueprint and a draft or update should  resilience as an interwoven or guiding theme. This allows a community to construct their own vision of what it means to be “resilient,” as well as identify and prioritize action items that increase resilience. The process for incorporating resiliency into a comprehensive plan can be achieved by following the steps outlined in the Comprehensive Plan tool profile of this Guide. A comprehensive plan that incorporates resilience encompasses natural and human-caused hazards (the “shocks” to a community), while also addressing the social, environmental, and economic “stressors” into the goals and strategies. To achieve this, comprehensive planning efforts should be informed by a risk assessment that includes identification of hazards and existing or potential stressors.

The City of Longmont updated their comprehensive plan in 2016 using a systems approach with sustainability and resilience woven throughout the plan. Other examples of comprehensive plans that address hazard risk reduction and resilience can be found in the Comprehensive Plan tool profile of this guide.

Conduct a Resilience Audit of Existing Plans and Policies

Another approach for assessing and promoting resilience is to conduct an audit or evaluation of plans and land use policies that already guide the functioning and operation of the community. This enables a community to identify possible inconsistencies among plans, policies, and programs that can be addressed to increase resilience to both shocks and stressors. Below are several examples of audits that can be tailored to a community’s existing conditions.

The Safe Growth Audit is a valuable tool for ensuring that comprehensive plans, zoning, capital improvement programs, subdivision regulations, building codes, and more are promoting policies that reduce the vulnerability of communities to hazards. This process involves reading and evaluating all relevant plans and policies, and answering targeted questions about how they promote hazard mitigation. The author, David R. Godschalk, FAICP, also outlines several common principles of safe growth that should be carried out by communities:

• Guide growth away from high-risk locations
• Locate critical facilities outside high-risk zones
• Preserve protective ecosystems
• Retrofit buildings and facilities at risk in redeveloping areas
• Develop knowledgeable community leaders and networks
• Monitor and update safe growth programs and plans

While the Safe Growth Audit focuses primarily on resilience to hazards, this approach can easily be expanded to include questions regarding social and economic resilience specific to community stressors. Example audit questions include:

• Does the comprehensive plan set forth policies to reduce the number of housing units that are not up to code and/or vulnerable to natural hazards?
• Does zoning density encourage the construction of affordable housing in non-hazardous areas?

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Smart Growth Implementation Assistance program in Vermont developed a Flood Resilience Checklist to “help communities identify opportunities to improve their resilience to future floods through policy and regulatory tools, including comprehensive plans, Hazard Mitigation Plans, local land use codes and regulations, and non-regulatory programs implemented at the local level.” While this checklist is focused on flooding, several questions are also applicable to other common hazards and resiliency generally. Some examples of questions asked in the Flood Resilience Checklist include:

• Does the comprehensive plan cross-reference the local Hazard Mitigation Plan and any disaster recovery plans?
• Has the community implemented non-regulatory strategies to conserve land in river corridors?
• Do land development regulations and building codes promote safer building and rebuilding in flood-prone areas?

• Planning for resilience can reduce future disaster-related response and recovery costs and improve recovery time following natural or human-caused hazard events.
• A resilience plan or audit provides the community with an understanding of policies, programs, and other actions that can be taken across many sectors to improve the community’s resilience to hazards or changing conditions.
• Planning for resilience can help a community anticipate and reduce the severity of economic downturns and other stressors.
• Resilience can be interwoven into any planning process in the community, such as an economic development plan, hazard mitigation plan, or parks and recreation plan

• Since resilience spans across many sectors, it may be challenging to secure sustained participation and support from all relevant stakeholders.
• Strategies that may promote resilience in one sector (such as increasing affordable housing) may conflict with another component of resilience (such as prohibiting development in high-hazard areas) without consistent coordination.
• Clearly articulating the concept of resilience and its value to the public can be challenging. The planning team will need to thoughtfully consider how to craft this message.