Melissa L Finucane

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and its partners develop implementation plans to meet water quality standards. Climate change and other key drivers may significantly affect these plans, but are often neglected due to uncertainty. This study uses two case studies to demonstrate how Robust Decision Making (RDM) can help to address future uncertainty by identifying vulnerabilities in water quality plans and suggesting appropriate responses.

To explore lessons learned from nondeclared-disaster events, researchers explain six case studies from diverse community contexts, considering innovations that support recovery in underserved communities and metrics for assessing nonprofits' role in socioeconomic recovery. Recommendations address data limitations with near- and longer-term efforts to capture nonprofits' activities and roles through systematic qualitative and quantitative methods.

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.

To ensure that federal agencies incorporate key principles of resilience into their formulation, evaluation, and prioritization of infrastructure investments related to Sandy rebuilding, the Presidential Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force developed its Infrastructure Resilience Guidelines. RAND researchers conducted an initial assessment of federal agencies implementation of the guidelines to identify the main opportunities and challenges."