title: Models for the Economics of Resilience.
abstract: Estimating the economic burden of disasters requires appropriate models that account for key characteristics and decision making needs. Natural disasters in 2011 resulted in $366 billion in direct damages and 29,782 fatalities worldwide. Average annual losses in the US amount to about $55 billion. Enhancing community and system resilience could lead to significant savings through risk reduction and expeditious recovery. The management of such reduction and recovery is facilitated by an appropriate definition of resilience and associated metrics with models for examining the economics of resilience. This paper provides such microeconomic models, compares them, examines their sensitivities to key parameters, and illustrates their uses. Such models enable improving the resiliency of systems to meet target levels.
authors.affiliation: National Institute of Standards and Technology, 100 Bureau Drive, MS 8603, Gaithersburg, MD 20899. stanley.gilbert@NIST.gov.
authors.forename: Stanley
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gilbert
authors.affiliation: Environmental Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742; Visitor, National Security Analysis Department, The Applied Physics Laboratory, The Johns Hopkins University. ba@umd.edu.
authors.forename: Bilal M
authors.initials: BM
authors.lastname: Ayyub
keywords: Community; Consequence; Economics; Infrastructure; Measure; Metrics; Recovery; Resilience