Based on the premise that investing in hazard risk mitigation will reduce spending on recovery and response, the federal Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program recognizes that equity issues are important in helping communities' mitigation efforts. Researchers identified ways to address these issues while enhancing the accuracy of natural hazard assessment in future BRIC grant decisionmaking, as described in this report.

The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Mitigation Grant Program

Incorporating Hazard Risk and Social Equity into Decisionmaking Processes

Noreen Clancy, Melissa L. Finucane, Jordan R. Fischbach, David G. Groves, Debra Knopman, Karishma V. Patel, Lloyd Dixon

ResearchPublished Mar 23, 2022

Natural disasters have become more frequent and destructive. In 2020, the United States experienced the most billion-dollar disasters ever, with a total cost of $96.4 billion. Moreover, disaster damaged some communities — most notably, low-income and disadvantaged communities — more than others.

Much of the disruption and damage caused by these disasters could have been reduced through mitigation — that is, predisaster actions known to reduce damage and ease recovery. The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant award program is intended to help communities undertake this mitigation.

Authorized by Congress in 2018 and administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the program includes equity considerations alongside risk reduction, which represents a significant break with past policy and practice and foreshadows a new approach to building community resilience. How to meet these goals is the focus of this report, in which the authors identify ways for BRIC to develop a multihazard, forward-looking, risk-based approach to mitigation that also incorporates issues of equity and community well-being in its application and evaluation processes.

Key Takeaways

  • No single risk assessment tool is both quantitative and qualitative; has comprehensive and consistent data coverage in terms of hazards, geographic extent, and spatial scale; is transparent and accessible; and considers future and cascading risks, including to lifeline infrastructure.
  • The majority of risk assessment tools are focused on asset damage as the key outcome metric.
  • Current priorities do not reflect social systems or resources as essential parts of effective mitigation.
  • Comprehensive equity assessments are constrained by data limitations, as well as by a lack of clearly defined goals, mechanisms, target audiences, and metrics.
  • Benefit–cost and risk analyses are currently biased toward wealthy communities, while underserved populations face challenges meeting BRIC criteria.
  • An application evaluation tool can help determine which priorities BRIC addresses and which it omits.

Recommendations

  • Develop an action-logic model that demonstrates BRIC's pathways to equitable outcomes.
  • Address a broader set of drivers of vulnerability with risk mitigation strategies.
  • Add new criteria that include social resources as a key aspect of community resilience.
  • Identify reliable and valid equity metrics, and establish a process for data collection and analysis.
  • Use the National Risk Index to identify hazards and risks that are most relevant to BRIC, and develop ways to incorporate lifeline infrastructure exposure and future changes to hazard risk.
  • Provide more support to underserved populations in the application process.
  • Revise current methods for determining cost-effectiveness to reflect broader understandings of well-being.
  • Use the application evaluation tool to review year 1 BRIC applications to determine whether priorities are being addressed.

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Clancy, Noreen, Melissa L. Finucane, Jordan R. Fischbach, David G. Groves, Debra Knopman, Karishma V. Patel, and Lloyd Dixon, The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Mitigation Grant Program: Incorporating Hazard Risk and Social Equity into Decisionmaking Processes. Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center operated by the RAND Corporation, 2022. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1258-1.html.
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This research was sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and conducted within the Strategy, Policy and Operations Program of the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center (HSOAC) FFRDC.

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