NIST’s Economic Decision Guide Software (EDGe$) Tool offers a technique for selecting cost-effective community resilience projects. It provides a standard economic methodology for evaluating investment decisions required to improve the ability of communities to adapt to, withstand, and quickly recover from natural, technology, and human-caused disruptive events.
The tool helps to identify and compare the relevant present and future resilience costs and benefits associated with new capital investment versus maintaining a community’s status-quo. Users can register an account for the software free of cost, and can start a new analysis or open examples of analyses. When users start a new analysis, they have to include the project’s planning horizon, real discount rate, risk preferences, and hazard recurrence distribution.
The analysis software also considers the new project’s alternatives, externalities, benefits, non-disaster benefits, and fatalities averted. This decision support software is designed to support those engaged in community-level resilience planning, including community planners and resilience officers, as well as economic development, budget, and public works officials.
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