Building community resilience through modern model building codes

This publication provides a comprehensive overview of community resilience, what it entails, and why it’s important. In addition to an extensive literature review, the document provides a number of examples of communities with effective pre-disaster mitigation strategies and outlines code provisions from the International Codes that were put in place to mitigate future risk.

To attain whole community resilience, a community must understand the interconnections between its critical systems, how they might be impacted by adverse events, and how they can make the systems and the community stronger, more adaptable, and more quickly able to recover when disaster strikes. Significant social and economic gains can be made by investing in mitigation to reduce the human and financial losses associated with such events—to make communities safer and more disaster resilient.

Resilience in the built environment starts with strong, regularly adopted, and properly administered building codes. Study after study confirms that adopting and effectively implementing current model building codes is the nation’s best defense against hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, flooding, and other natural disasters.