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• 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.

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.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Design of the BRIC Grant Program for Year 1

• Chapter Three

  Integrating Natural Hazard-Risk Considerations into BRIC

• Chapter Four

  Challenges Integrating Equity into BRIC

• Chapter Five

  Visualizing the Applications, Risk, and Sociodemographic Measures of the BRIC Program

• Chapter Six

  Findings, Recommendations, and Concluding Thoughts

• Appendix A

  A Review of Other Federal Grant Programs

• Appendix B

  Criteria for Comparing Existing National Hazard-Risk Assessment Tools

• Appendix C

  Existing National Risk Assessment Tools

• Appendix D

  Data Used by the Application Evaluation Tool