FEMA Releases New National Resilience Guidance

As part of its push for resilient communities, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has released a National Resilience Guidance (NRG), a guide to facilitating a more resilient nation through communities that thrive in social, economic, environmental and secure institutional systems.

“Building resilience enables communities to respond faster and recover more effectively,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said in a statement. “To truly build nationwide resilience, it requires a multipronged approach and dedicated effort across the whole community. This new National Resilience Guidance provides critical concepts and key principles that communities can apply to strengthen resilience, setting the foundation for building more resilience communities.”

The NRG presents, through steps all communities can take, a unifying vision of resilience and explains the key relationship between chronic community stressors and shocks, according to a press release. The NRG addresses resilient actions that can be scalable and implemented by all stakeholders.

The complexity of the topic requires the need for a truly whole community, according to the NRG. In developing the NRG, FEMA engaged with a broad range of partners to inform development, conducting more than 80 meetings with federal and nonfederal partners, as well as listening sessions and virtual engagements with more than 1,000 participants around the nation.

The discussions, with various disciplines, sectors, levels of government, communities and individuals, covered a range of topics, actions and the partnerships needed to develop goals.

The discussions engaged the stakeholders on the roles and responsibilities of the whole community, innovative approaches for successful resilience planning, and the resources required to convey a whole-community understanding of roles and how to execute them.