In the wake of the increasing impacts of climate change, governments and businesses are assessing how climate-related risks may manifest and differ from historical experience, and how resilience can be integrated within decision-making and planning processes. In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy signed the Executive Order 89 (EO 89) in October 2019 ordering various government agencies to work together in order to cultivate policies and strategies that establish community resilience and develop a “Statewide Climate Change Resilience Strategy.” This order created a need for approaches and frameworks to facilitate and streamline interdepartmental collaboration concerning resilience-based planning and resources allocations.
This team, with support from the New Jersey State Policy Lab, has previously worked on enhancing the scientific and practical foundation of resilience by uncovering the limitations of existing resilience quantification approaches, which led the team to develop the concept of ARez, an area resilience measurement framework. This research will further develop the concept of ARez into a fully functional validated GIS tool, enabling practitioners and agencies to easily tailor the quantification of resilience to reflect current and local needs and priorities within New Jersey.