Essential Community Functions
The NIST Community Resilience Planning Guide is one resource that outlines a series of basic societal functions that communities provide, such as economic growth, education, and public health. In every community, both urban and rural, these societal functions are enabled by infrastructure assets and systems working together to provide critical services. For example, the public health function relies on electric power to run lights and hospital equipment, clean water for sanitation, emergency services and transportation infrastructure to transport patients and healthcare providers, and many other infrastructure sectors.
A functional approach begins with understanding what functions are critical to a community or region's success and examines how those functions can be made more resilient. Importantly, this approach does not mean protecting individual assets and systems but instead encourages users to think about how a function can be preserved. For example, while hardening electric grid infrastructure can improve the resilience of community functions, a similar result may be achieved through deploying generators to critical facilities. Ultimately, the goal is to limit disruptions to the delivery of essential community functions, whether by reducing the likelihood of infrastructure systems disruptions or reducing their consequences.
Importantly, infrastructure assets and systems not only support societal functions but are also interconnected with and reliant on one another to operate. For example, a community’s water system is almost certainly dependent on electricity to manage filtration processes and power pumps. And electric power generation and transmission systems rely on communication networks to manage, monitor, and control the flow of electricity. Moreover, many of these systems are large and geographically dispersed, crossing local jurisdictions and state lines and requiring coordination with many partners to enhance resilience.