Watershed Regional Risk and Resilience (R3) Playbook
A Task Group of NR3C participants in partnership with the National Hazard Mitigation Association and other organizations over a three-year period produced a Watershed Regional Risk and Resilience Playbook for public, private, and non-profit stakeholders across the country. The Playbook operationalizes a Nationwide Watershed Regional Risk and Resilience (R3) Goal & Strategy, which the Task Group developed under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer’s Dam Sector Regional Risk and Resilience Program (DSR3P). The intent was to help meet the urgent need to improve the resilience of the Nation’s watershed regions and the communities and critical infrastructures located within them.
The initial Playbook, published in September 2025, offered guidance, tools, and resources to organize, conduct, and sustain stakeholder-developed and managed initiatives to assess risk and enhance holistic regional resilience. Version 2.0 of the Playbook with additional resources has now been released and is available below. It includes a separate set of instructions on how to create and use an AI-powered "Watershed R3 Assistant" to help in undertaking the guidance in the Playbook.
Towards this end, the Playbook is designed for users with differing levels of resilience-related knowledge, capabilities, staff, and financial resources. Users can adapt the Playbook guidance to fit their needs and available resources and employ any of the resilience guides or other planning resources cited in the Playbook depending on their interests and/or the requirements of the initiative’s sponsoring organization(s).
The Playbook offers guidance and selected tools and resources that can be customized for undertaking a continuous holistic approach with a multi-step process, providing a description of each step in the process and how to accomplish it:
1. Laying the foundation with broad stakeholder engagement
2. Characterizing regional infrastructures and designing the assessment
3. Data collection
4. Undertaking the risk assessment
5. Developing an action strategy and implementation plan
6. Identifying and securing resources and investment for implementation and sustainment, and
7. Enabling continuous resilience improvement using lessons learned from future events, exercises, and best practices from other states and regions.
The Playbook also provides information on challenges decisionmakers
and key stakeholders typically face and how to address them, including how to facilitate information-sharing, obtain necessary data, secure investments, and generate political will and community support. The Playbook in addition provides examples of Watershed Regional Resilience Initiatives that have employed a multi-step process.