Equipping Insurers with Better Risk Reduction

Breaking Down the NIBS Resilience Roadmap 2023

Photo by Nathan Cima on Unsplash

Resilience in the context of buildings and infrastructure refers to their ability to withstand and recover from various hazards, including natural disasters, climate change impacts, and other disruptive events. The National Institute of Building Sciences, a non-profit organization, has been actively involved in promoting resilience in the built environment through research, education, and advocacy.

The Resilience Incentivization Roadmap aims to outline strategies and recommendations to incentivize stakeholders—such as builders, developers, policymakers, and communities—to invest in and prioritize resilient building practices.

These roadmaps often involve collaboration between government agencies, industry experts, academia, and community representatives to develop comprehensive plans for enhancing the resilience of buildings and infrastructure.

Key components of the Resilience Incentivization Roadmap include:

1. Policy Recommendations: Proposals for regulatory and policy changes that promote and incentivize resilient building practices. This involves things like tax incentives, grants, or subsidies for implementing resilient design and construction methods.

2. Standards and Guidelines: Establishing or updating building codes, standards, and guidelines to ensure that structures are designed and constructed with resilience in mind, i.e. integrating climate adaptation measures, improving structural integrity, and using resilient materials.

3. Education and Awareness: Initiatives to educate stakeholders about the importance of resilience and its long-term benefits, like training programs, workshops, or campaigns to spread awareness about best practices in resilient construction.

4. Research and Innovation: Encouraging research and development in new technologies, materials, and methodologies that enhance building resilience, like funding for research projects or partnerships between academia and industry to drive innovation.

5. Community Engagement: Engaging with communities to understand their needs and vulnerabilities, and involving them in the decision-making process Empowering communities to adopt resilient practices and develop localized resilience plans is crucial.

6. Public-Private Partnerships: Encouraging collaboration between government agencies, private sector entities, and non-profit organizations to collectively work towards resilience goals. This might involve joint initiatives, funding arrangements, or knowledge-sharing platforms.

NIBS, through its Resilience Incentivization Roadmap, focuses on these aspects and more, aiming to create a roadmap that provides actionable strategies for stakeholders to enhance the resilience of buildings and infrastructure across the nation. We’ve been breaking down the relationship between stakeholders and specifically insurers, with an emphasis on supporting the end user or homeowner and how to enact viable strategies that reduce costs and liability. 

Homeowners bare the majority of the cost and while it does offer them quite a bit of risk reduction, it disproportionately benefits other co-beneficiaries and bumps the average resident out of the order. People are urged to do work that they can see a tangible value in, which in many instances, isn’t risk reduction work unless another stakeholder steps up to offer that value.

We’ve broken the key instances of the report down in our first whitepaper, available for download here!