As the authoritative source for standards, guidelines, and policy that improve the resilience of the built environment, ASCE develops design standards that are adopted into building codes and provides unique guidance to each community’s challenges across the globe. To aid efforts to champion building resiliently, ASCE just released Pathways to Resilient Communities: Infrastructure Designed for the Environmental Hazards in Your Region.
What Resiliency Resources Are Included?
What Resiliency Resources Are Included?The toolkit guides civil engineers and community leaders across the country on how to ensure the widespread adoption and enforcement of up-to-date, modern building codes and standards in response to severe storms and other threats to infrastructure.
The new toolkit features ASCE’s most widely adopted hazard-specific standards, including ASCE 7-22 Minimum Design Loads and Associated Criteria for Building and Other Structures, for threats to the built environment by region, including flooding, earthquakes, wind, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, winter weather and more. The document also goes one step further and explains how each standard can benefit communities that are more vulnerable to particular hazards.
In addition to highlighting ASCE’s standards, the toolkit highlights the Envision program, operated by the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, and developed by ASCE, the American Public Works Association (APWA), and the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC).
The Envision Program is a comprehensive tool which helps businesses and government design and build civil infrastructure that addresses climate change, public health, environmental justice, and the project’s economic benefits. Envision verification provides an evidence-based approach to demonstrate a project meets the community’s needs and expectations.
How ASCE Is Promoting Resilient Infrastructure Strategies
Pathways to Resilient Communities is just one in a series of steps that the Society has taken recently to provide resources that can benefit community and infrastructure resilience. Late last month, ASCE 7-22 was given an update to its flood mitigation chapter, which will improve the expected performance of buildings and structures located in flood hazard areas by using the 500-year flood as its threshold, up from the 100-year threshold. The update — which is available in a supplement as a free download — is a significant revision of the design provisions in Chapter 5 to strengthen building resilience against the flood hazard.
Over the upcoming months, ASCE will be sharing the new resilient infrastructure toolkit with policymakers at all levels of government and is encouraging ASCE members across the country to incorporate it in discussions that they are already having with community leaders on resilience.
Whether it’s your local building code official, state lawmakers, or your city or county leaders, this new resilience toolkit was developed to make it easy for a non-engineering audience to better understand how ASCE standards not only work, but how they can help communities build more resilient infrastructure!