In numerous conversations lately, I sense that the new administration is struggling with a common problem as it searches for the way it will deal with the theme of resilience particularly in the area of public/private sector coordination and cooperation. The basic issue is one that we at CARRI have recognized and similarly struggled with since we began our resilience work. I usually describe it as, “get it right or get it now?”
Hurricane season will be here in just a few days. All of us want to be better prepared than we were last year with new systems, processes and collaborations in place. The reality of a fast approaching season of recurring, predictable natural disaster provides the imperative to do something visible now. The reality of our system of government is that we will not make productive, large-scale changes to our national systems before this season begins.
Resilience is a complex topic whether at the national, regional or community level. For our governments, it is a new way of looking at the old issues surrounding the response to natural disasters. While there are certainly things that can be done quickly based on lessons learned, we will not build a complete system of resilience quickly. Bringing together workshops of experts for a few days may advance our understanding of what needs to be done; they will not provide the answers necessary to fully inculcate resilience into our systems. Hastily organized and promulgated programs developed in isolation within the Washington beltway may demonstrate that our leaders understand the urgency of the issues; they will not quickly translate into accepted practice and meaningful progress at the local level – particularly if they are not funded.
But the issues are urgent. There is no time for the academic and policy communities to debate the absolute best way to reach national resilience until we reach absolute programmatic certainty. The best way to get resilience right is to get the resilience conversation started now – and then move it along quickly.
The current conversation is fragmented. It is fragmented by agencies in governments. It is fragmented between levels of government. It is fragmented between the public and private sectors. And it is fragmented among the private sectors. In our system of government the best progress is made fastest when we get everyone involved in the conversation and make everyone an owner of the solution. That is why CARRI has called for a federally supported, grass-roots, bottoms-up conversation to create a common framework for community resilience. Resilient communities make resilient regions and a resilient nation. We can do that now and by putting all the knowledge and creativity of the nation together, we can get it right.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
Moving Toward a National Community Resilience Framework
There is no commonly accepted national framework for identifying resilient communities or for assisting communities to self-assess and then work toward a state of resilience in a methodical, systematic approach assisted by accepted tools and processes so as to reap the economic and social benefits of becoming resilient. Understanding what a common framework would entail and creating a solid starting point for a national discussion has been a goal of CARRI from its inception. Establishing such a common framework is best done, in partnership, at the local, grass-roots level and in a broad-based manner that is inclusive of all elements of the community fabric – governmental, private business, associational, non-profit and faith-based – rather than top-driven by the federal government.
In many communities and regions across the United States there are initiatives, policies, plans, and technologies under development at the local and regional level that are realistic, practical, and focused on community needs. These labors have been started by business groups, local or state government officials, research institutions, economic development associations or non-profits but have not yet been coordinated to achieve a broad-based, grass-roots driven, commonly accepted result. It is time to bring all these efforts together in a national effort to establish the framework that can guide communities as they work systematically to become more resilient.
CARRI strongly supports the establishment of a National Commission on Regional and Community Resilience composed of elected governors, elected mayors, appropriate representatives of national organizations and associations and representatives of private business to supervise the creation of common framework for community and regional resilience that meets the needs of our citizens, businesses and governments, and voluntary and faith-based organizations; provides an understanding of and agreed upon terminology for community and regional resilience; examines how communities and regions can collaborate to achieve and sustain cost-effective resilience; and recommends to governments at all levels policies that are required to foster resilient communities.
In many communities and regions across the United States there are initiatives, policies, plans, and technologies under development at the local and regional level that are realistic, practical, and focused on community needs. These labors have been started by business groups, local or state government officials, research institutions, economic development associations or non-profits but have not yet been coordinated to achieve a broad-based, grass-roots driven, commonly accepted result. It is time to bring all these efforts together in a national effort to establish the framework that can guide communities as they work systematically to become more resilient.
CARRI strongly supports the establishment of a National Commission on Regional and Community Resilience composed of elected governors, elected mayors, appropriate representatives of national organizations and associations and representatives of private business to supervise the creation of common framework for community and regional resilience that meets the needs of our citizens, businesses and governments, and voluntary and faith-based organizations; provides an understanding of and agreed upon terminology for community and regional resilience; examines how communities and regions can collaborate to achieve and sustain cost-effective resilience; and recommends to governments at all levels policies that are required to foster resilient communities.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Building an Assessment Framework
From the beginning of CARRI, we have worked to combine the knowledge we have gained from prominent disaster researchers enlisted in the national research team assembled by Tom Wilbanks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with that of the ‘on-the-ground’ research done in the Gulfport/Gulf Coast Area, the Memphis Urban Area, and the Charleston Low Country Area. The goal is to develop an assessment framework that any community can use to assess its resilience. The framework will combine a statistical snapshot of the community based on readily available data sources, with a self-assessment that provides a lens for the community to examine its assets at risk, its resources, and its planning, leadership and communication.
The national research team has provided valuable information as we work toward developing the assessment framework.
Craig Colten, from Louisiana State University, R.W. Cates, and S.B. Laska, from the University of New Orleans, overviewed the lessons from Hurricane Katrina that relate to disaster recovery and community resilience. Susan Cutter, from the University of South Carolina, provided valuable insights into how the concept of resilience can be understood from the perspective of hazards, disasters and emergency management—pointing out that research in these areas has always been done with an eye on practical policy. Lance Gunderson, from Emory University, researched how resilience, as it has been applied to ecological systems, can inform work on human communities. Betty Hearn Morrow, from Florida International University, examined how socially vulnerable populations are affected by policy decisions and the implications for community resilience. Susanne Moser examined how research on global climate change can inform our thinking about community resilience.
These researchers have all, from different perspectives, kept us aware of the existing bodies of research that can directly inform the CARRI concept of community resilience. Because these are researchers who have always had their eye on the policy implications of their work, I have not been surprised to find a great deal of resonance between their work and what we have heard from community leaders as they have raised issues and concerns about resilience. Certainly most everyone—disaster researchers and policy makers—have been mindful of what seemed to work and not work after Katrina. All have realized that the initial response was only part of the story and that the rest is still being written as recovery efforts continue. As we have talked to those involved in emergency management, they have come to understand that response is not recovery, but it is intimately connected to it. It is becoming understood that just as we are planning our responses to disasters, we also need to plan to our recovery. The interaction and connectedness between ecological and human community systems is recognized as a two-way street with respect to recovery. Certainly there is acceptance from the leaders that socially vulnerable population need consideration in a variety of ways in both emergency response and recovery and the reality of climate change has finally penetrated into local policy-making.
All of this work provides a backstop to the development of an assessment framework. Without it, we could not be successful.
The national research team has provided valuable information as we work toward developing the assessment framework.
Craig Colten, from Louisiana State University, R.W. Cates, and S.B. Laska, from the University of New Orleans, overviewed the lessons from Hurricane Katrina that relate to disaster recovery and community resilience. Susan Cutter, from the University of South Carolina, provided valuable insights into how the concept of resilience can be understood from the perspective of hazards, disasters and emergency management—pointing out that research in these areas has always been done with an eye on practical policy. Lance Gunderson, from Emory University, researched how resilience, as it has been applied to ecological systems, can inform work on human communities. Betty Hearn Morrow, from Florida International University, examined how socially vulnerable populations are affected by policy decisions and the implications for community resilience. Susanne Moser examined how research on global climate change can inform our thinking about community resilience.
These researchers have all, from different perspectives, kept us aware of the existing bodies of research that can directly inform the CARRI concept of community resilience. Because these are researchers who have always had their eye on the policy implications of their work, I have not been surprised to find a great deal of resonance between their work and what we have heard from community leaders as they have raised issues and concerns about resilience. Certainly most everyone—disaster researchers and policy makers—have been mindful of what seemed to work and not work after Katrina. All have realized that the initial response was only part of the story and that the rest is still being written as recovery efforts continue. As we have talked to those involved in emergency management, they have come to understand that response is not recovery, but it is intimately connected to it. It is becoming understood that just as we are planning our responses to disasters, we also need to plan to our recovery. The interaction and connectedness between ecological and human community systems is recognized as a two-way street with respect to recovery. Certainly there is acceptance from the leaders that socially vulnerable population need consideration in a variety of ways in both emergency response and recovery and the reality of climate change has finally penetrated into local policy-making.
All of this work provides a backstop to the development of an assessment framework. Without it, we could not be successful.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Resiliency IS Protection
For at least two years there has been an ongoing debate on the emphasis that the Department of Homeland Security should place on resilience in lieu of a perceived prejudice for protection.
The juxtaposition of resiliency and protection as themes for the Department of Homeland Security misstates the issues – it is not either/or. A different way of looking at the problem is as a continuum of Prevent, Protect (to include Mitigate), Respond and Recover -- with preparedness as a theme underlying all of those tasks AND Resilience as the outcome. One needs to prepare to prevent, prepare to protect, prepare to respond and prepare to recover. Creating a capacity to address all of these areas in a coherent manner builds resilience in a system or in an organization. The Nation’s current challenge is to establish the full mission in one inclusive continuum that addresses national expectations and includes systems designed to achieve full recovery at the end of an event, preparedness for each segment of the continuum, and the inclusion of all relevant public and private actors in the processes.
Resilience is the goal of the continuum. We cannot prevent all occurrences, but we can prevent some, and we should focus on prevention where prevention is realistic – terrorism, flooding, pandemic and food borne illness, for instance. We cannot protect ourselves from all things, but we can focus on things that absolutely require high levels of protection – nuclear power plants, mass transportation assets, critical communications structures. While we will need to respond to failures in prevention and protection, we can focus recovery preparations on those events where we know that we will fail – hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, ice storms. True preparedness for recovery requires more than the current focus on short-term recovery of basic services and functions. It requires instead an adjustment of thinking which aims from the beginning at regaining the rhythms of life, commerce, and interactions which define the long term recovery of every community. We need to see and understand the linkages between the work done before the event along the resiliency continuum and the ability to recover fully and quickly after the event.
Achieving Resilience implies the systematic inclusion of the full fabric of society in the continuum of preparedness in order to secure a full recovery. While the efforts of governments (federal, state, local, tribal) are critical, they are not sufficient. The private business sector provides most of the Nation’s critical infrastructure and must be integrated either voluntarily or through regulation. Each method will have a place. The business sector will have an incentive to participate in resilience activities where they can be shown to prevent loss and ensure a degree of protection from business disruptions. Large businesses already operate across the continuum – preventing those things that seem preventable, protecting critical assets and information, responding to disruptions as required and getting their business back on line as quickly as possible. Because the best of them operate this way on a daily basis, the private business sector inherently “gets” resilience. On the other hand, they frequently see protection as a governmental responsibility that may come with regulation, restriction and demand for proprietary information.
In a wider sense, the private sector is not limited to the private business sector but also includes the non-governmental, volunteer, faith-based, academic and associational organizations that make up our social fabric. All of these organizations are important to the resilience continuum – some are critical. Very few of these entities view themselves as agents of “protection” and yet they bring tremendous resources to the response and recovery effort when prevention and protection fail. This part of the private sector is best engaged under the rubric of resilience. Their involvement in the preparation phase can magnify the potential for faster and more complete community-level response and recovery. In addition, they can play a critical role in building a culture of individual and family resilience. This is an often invisible element of critical infrastructure protection and recovery because without staff and employees capable of returning to work, no facility or sector can sustain itself during an incident or recover and return to full functionality.
Finally, a focus only on protection leads to a built in bias against a systems or network approach for dealing with critical infrastructure and therefore does not address inherent vulnerabilities associated with critical sectors. No sector exists in isolation and none can be fully protected from failure. Resilience implies a conceptual framework that encourages an understanding of critical interdependencies between sectors and acknowledges that failure in one critical sector always affects other sectors frequently cascading sufficiently to bring down the entire system. The resilience continuum looks across sectors to discover what part of the continuum is best applied to specific parts of the system – like robust private business protecting what can be protected, preventing where prevention is possible and preparing to respond and recover where these efforts fail.
CARRI is working to help reinforce the resilience continuum.
The juxtaposition of resiliency and protection as themes for the Department of Homeland Security misstates the issues – it is not either/or. A different way of looking at the problem is as a continuum of Prevent, Protect (to include Mitigate), Respond and Recover -- with preparedness as a theme underlying all of those tasks AND Resilience as the outcome. One needs to prepare to prevent, prepare to protect, prepare to respond and prepare to recover. Creating a capacity to address all of these areas in a coherent manner builds resilience in a system or in an organization. The Nation’s current challenge is to establish the full mission in one inclusive continuum that addresses national expectations and includes systems designed to achieve full recovery at the end of an event, preparedness for each segment of the continuum, and the inclusion of all relevant public and private actors in the processes.
Resilience is the goal of the continuum. We cannot prevent all occurrences, but we can prevent some, and we should focus on prevention where prevention is realistic – terrorism, flooding, pandemic and food borne illness, for instance. We cannot protect ourselves from all things, but we can focus on things that absolutely require high levels of protection – nuclear power plants, mass transportation assets, critical communications structures. While we will need to respond to failures in prevention and protection, we can focus recovery preparations on those events where we know that we will fail – hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, ice storms. True preparedness for recovery requires more than the current focus on short-term recovery of basic services and functions. It requires instead an adjustment of thinking which aims from the beginning at regaining the rhythms of life, commerce, and interactions which define the long term recovery of every community. We need to see and understand the linkages between the work done before the event along the resiliency continuum and the ability to recover fully and quickly after the event.
Achieving Resilience implies the systematic inclusion of the full fabric of society in the continuum of preparedness in order to secure a full recovery. While the efforts of governments (federal, state, local, tribal) are critical, they are not sufficient. The private business sector provides most of the Nation’s critical infrastructure and must be integrated either voluntarily or through regulation. Each method will have a place. The business sector will have an incentive to participate in resilience activities where they can be shown to prevent loss and ensure a degree of protection from business disruptions. Large businesses already operate across the continuum – preventing those things that seem preventable, protecting critical assets and information, responding to disruptions as required and getting their business back on line as quickly as possible. Because the best of them operate this way on a daily basis, the private business sector inherently “gets” resilience. On the other hand, they frequently see protection as a governmental responsibility that may come with regulation, restriction and demand for proprietary information.
In a wider sense, the private sector is not limited to the private business sector but also includes the non-governmental, volunteer, faith-based, academic and associational organizations that make up our social fabric. All of these organizations are important to the resilience continuum – some are critical. Very few of these entities view themselves as agents of “protection” and yet they bring tremendous resources to the response and recovery effort when prevention and protection fail. This part of the private sector is best engaged under the rubric of resilience. Their involvement in the preparation phase can magnify the potential for faster and more complete community-level response and recovery. In addition, they can play a critical role in building a culture of individual and family resilience. This is an often invisible element of critical infrastructure protection and recovery because without staff and employees capable of returning to work, no facility or sector can sustain itself during an incident or recover and return to full functionality.
Finally, a focus only on protection leads to a built in bias against a systems or network approach for dealing with critical infrastructure and therefore does not address inherent vulnerabilities associated with critical sectors. No sector exists in isolation and none can be fully protected from failure. Resilience implies a conceptual framework that encourages an understanding of critical interdependencies between sectors and acknowledges that failure in one critical sector always affects other sectors frequently cascading sufficiently to bring down the entire system. The resilience continuum looks across sectors to discover what part of the continuum is best applied to specific parts of the system – like robust private business protecting what can be protected, preventing where prevention is possible and preparing to respond and recover where these efforts fail.
CARRI is working to help reinforce the resilience continuum.
Friday, May 1, 2009
The CARRI Community Forum
On April 28, 2009, CARRI brought together its three partner communities for a one-day conference in Charleston, South Carolina focusing on five topics – Executive Leadership and Community Resilience; The Private Sector and Community Resilience; Enhancing Community Resilience through Coordination; Building Local Resilience Capacity; and Local Government Leading the Way. The goal of the conference was to bring together each partner community to share lessons learned and create a series of white papers in each area of focus. These papers are intended to showcase successful resilience strategies in the partner communities so that other communities across the country can apply them in their own planning and resiliency efforts.
The CARRI Research Director, Dr. Tom Wilbanks, provided a quick summary of his observations of the conference to a group of CARRI affiliated scholars from across the nation. I thought it would be useful to share Tom’s observations via this blog. In the next few weeks, I will share other observations from the forum.
Tom wrote: On April 28, … I attended a “CARRI Partner Community Forum” in Charleston, SC. In essence, this event represented a handoff of community resilience responsibilities from the CARRI community teams to local community leaders. It included four mayors (Charleston and North Charleston, Memphis/Shelby County, and Gulfport), three city administrators, and local people representing private sector roles, cross-institutional local coordination, and local capacity development outside traditional government, e.g., in NGOs and faith-based institutions.
We were there simply to listen to what the community representatives had to say about community resilience, both to learn from their perspectives and to compare them with what has been emerging from the research component. Here is a summary of the messages that we heard:
(1) Community resilience means all-hazards planning – and also links with other community issues, such as poverty. In order to sustain itself, resilience has to show that coordination offers value-added in daily operations, not just in the event of an emergency.
(2) A key step on the way to resilience is tracing out a host of interdependencies: what depends on what – infrastructures, resources, information, authorizations, etc., etc.
(3) Resilience means that, in a community, people who need to respond together in an emergency know each other ahead of time. From Mayor Wharton: “A community that prepares together is going to stay together when something happens.” In fact, the benefits from broader acquaintanceships in a community extend well beyond the immediate purpose of preparedness.
(4) Timely communication structures that bridge community diversity are critical: especially non-traditional structures as normal structures fail to operate during an emergency. NGOs and faith-based organizations are often adaptable gap-fillers if they are included in the resilient community network ahead of time.
(5) Communities can do a lot on their own, and in fact resilience means taking responsibility for one’s own future rather than accepting dependence on others; but resilience also means linking local resources with resources (and rules) beyond community boundaries (e.g., FEMA rules on what costs that will be reimbursed…).
(6) It is critically important to care about the lives of the responders and their families – which requires advance preparation because this can get lost in the pressure of immediate response situations.
(7) It is also critically important to know one’s own community in great detail, especially regarding special needs. Again, NGOs and FBOs can help with this, because they often work with the least advantaged among the population.
(8) A key to response and recovery is getting businesses and schools up and operating quickly. Mayor Warr got everybody’s attention with his story of assuring that Gulfport’s local Walmart, Home Depot, etc. were very quickly in a position to sell the materials and commodities needed for response and recovery –- which meant that the sales taxes from response purchases went back into the community itself rather than elsewhere.
Our feeling was that these lessons from community experience – being offered by community people who are not generally very familiar with the research literatures – are in fact very consistent with the messages coming out of our summaries of resilience-related research. This is encouraging on both ends of the process. Rather than being a situation where research needs to be used to correct mistaken community impressions, or where community experiences need to be used to correct misguided research, the substantial overlap between lessons from experience and lessons from research needs to be highlighted as a very welcome emergent finding from the CARRI adventure.
The CARRI Research Director, Dr. Tom Wilbanks, provided a quick summary of his observations of the conference to a group of CARRI affiliated scholars from across the nation. I thought it would be useful to share Tom’s observations via this blog. In the next few weeks, I will share other observations from the forum.
Tom wrote: On April 28, … I attended a “CARRI Partner Community Forum” in Charleston, SC. In essence, this event represented a handoff of community resilience responsibilities from the CARRI community teams to local community leaders. It included four mayors (Charleston and North Charleston, Memphis/Shelby County, and Gulfport), three city administrators, and local people representing private sector roles, cross-institutional local coordination, and local capacity development outside traditional government, e.g., in NGOs and faith-based institutions.
We were there simply to listen to what the community representatives had to say about community resilience, both to learn from their perspectives and to compare them with what has been emerging from the research component. Here is a summary of the messages that we heard:
(1) Community resilience means all-hazards planning – and also links with other community issues, such as poverty. In order to sustain itself, resilience has to show that coordination offers value-added in daily operations, not just in the event of an emergency.
(2) A key step on the way to resilience is tracing out a host of interdependencies: what depends on what – infrastructures, resources, information, authorizations, etc., etc.
(3) Resilience means that, in a community, people who need to respond together in an emergency know each other ahead of time. From Mayor Wharton: “A community that prepares together is going to stay together when something happens.” In fact, the benefits from broader acquaintanceships in a community extend well beyond the immediate purpose of preparedness.
(4) Timely communication structures that bridge community diversity are critical: especially non-traditional structures as normal structures fail to operate during an emergency. NGOs and faith-based organizations are often adaptable gap-fillers if they are included in the resilient community network ahead of time.
(5) Communities can do a lot on their own, and in fact resilience means taking responsibility for one’s own future rather than accepting dependence on others; but resilience also means linking local resources with resources (and rules) beyond community boundaries (e.g., FEMA rules on what costs that will be reimbursed…).
(6) It is critically important to care about the lives of the responders and their families – which requires advance preparation because this can get lost in the pressure of immediate response situations.
(7) It is also critically important to know one’s own community in great detail, especially regarding special needs. Again, NGOs and FBOs can help with this, because they often work with the least advantaged among the population.
(8) A key to response and recovery is getting businesses and schools up and operating quickly. Mayor Warr got everybody’s attention with his story of assuring that Gulfport’s local Walmart, Home Depot, etc. were very quickly in a position to sell the materials and commodities needed for response and recovery –- which meant that the sales taxes from response purchases went back into the community itself rather than elsewhere.
Our feeling was that these lessons from community experience – being offered by community people who are not generally very familiar with the research literatures – are in fact very consistent with the messages coming out of our summaries of resilience-related research. This is encouraging on both ends of the process. Rather than being a situation where research needs to be used to correct mistaken community impressions, or where community experiences need to be used to correct misguided research, the substantial overlap between lessons from experience and lessons from research needs to be highlighted as a very welcome emergent finding from the CARRI adventure.
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