Opportunities for standardizing resilience, adaptation, and sustainability planning elements: a structured comparison of community-oriented planning guidance

Communities in the United States increasingly undertake distinct planning processes to build resilience to reduce natural hazard impacts, adapt to changing conditions, enhance sustainability to reduce energy and resource use and consumption, and promote economic prosperity. Planning efforts addressing these multifaceted goals result in community-based resilience, adaptation, and sustainability plans. Given the time- and resource-intensive nature of community planning, this study identifies shared processes, goals, and information requirements that could be standardized across these distinct planning objectives and identifies further guidance development needs to improve plan quality. A content analysis of resilience, adaptation, and sustainability planning guidance documents reveals structural similarities across plan goals, indicating that common standardized processes for goal setting, stakeholder engagement, and standard solution sets to mitigate natural hazard risk would be suitable for all three planning types. Conversely, unique technical requirements for analyzing natural hazard exposure and vulnerability in adaptation and resilience planning are not present in sustainability planning. These requirements are not suitable for common standard methods and necessitate unique planning workforce training. Comparing the assessment of plan guidance results with prior plan quality evaluations highlights a continued need for standard methods and metrics to improve plan evaluation and monitoring.