Local Disaster Resilience

Local Disaster Management explores what resilience means for local communities and local governments on the front line of responding to disasters and emergencies. Disaster management is often seen as a major international issue undertaken by global actors such as the UN, Red Cross and Red Crescent. Yet fundamentally, all disasters are local. Every disaster, regardless of its type, affects individuals, families and communities before they escalate to encompassing one or many communities or nations. This volume therefore explores fundamental issues of disaster and emergency management at the local level. What is resilience? What does resilience mean for a local government seeking to lessen the impact of disasters on their community? How do local governments adapt through their experiences of disasters and how do they recover from catastrophic experiences? This book explores these issues with chapters from top scholars in the field, draws out lessons for local government officials and disaster managers seeking to build community resilience, prepare their communities for a changing environment, and facilitate recovery after disasters strike. Local Disaster Management provides invaluable insight for local governments charged with managing the inescapable effects of climate change and the increasing frequency and severity of disasters, as well as for scholars of local governance, disaster resilience, government policy, and disaster management. The chapters were originally published as a special issue in Local Government Studies.

No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each. One way to reduce the impacts of disasters on the nation and its communities is to invest in enhancing resilience-the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative addresses the broad issue of increasing the nation's resilience to disasters. This book defines "national resilience", describes the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters, and frames the main issues related to increasing resilience in the United States. It also provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience and outlines additional information, data, gaps, and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation's resilience to disasters. Additionally, the book's authoring committee makes recommendations about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States. Enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward. Disaster Resilience confronts the topic of how to increase the nation's resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. Increasing disaster resilience is an imperative that requires the collective will of the nation and its communities. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.

Since 2000, the Gulf Coast states – Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida – have experienced a series of hurricanes, multiple floods and severe storms, and one oil spill. These disasters have not only been numerous but also devastating. Response to and recovery from these unprecedented disasters has been fraught with missteps in management. In efforts to avoid similar failures in the future, government agencies and policy practitioners have looked to recast emergency management, and community resilience has emerged as a way for to better prevent, manage, and recover from these disasters. How is disaster resilience perceived by local government officials and translated into their disaster response and recovery efforts? Ashley D. Ross systematically explores and measures disaster resilience across the Gulf Coast to gain a better understanding of how resilience in concept is translated into disaster management practices, particularly on the local government level. In doing so, she presents disaster resilience theory to the Gulf Coast using existing data to create county-level baseline indicators of Gulf Coast disaster resilience and an original survey of county emergency managers and elected municipal officials in 60 counties and 120 municipalities across the Gulf States. The findings of the original survey measure the disaster resilience perceptions held by local government officials, which are examined to identify commonalities and differences across the set of cases. Additional analyses compare these perceptions to objective baseline indicators of disaster resilience to assess how perceptions align with resilience realities. Local Disaster Resilience not only fills a critical gap in the literature by applying existing theories and models to a region that has experienced the worst disasters the United States has faced in the past decade, but it can also be used as a tool to advance our knowledge of disasters in an interdisciplinary manner.

We are witnessing an ever-increasing level and intensity of disasters from Ecuador to Ethiopia and beyond, devastating millions of ordinary lives and causing long-term misery for vulnerable populations. Bringing together 26 case studies from six continents, this volume provides a unique resource that discusses, in considerable depth, the multifaceted matrix of natural and human-made disasters. It examines their bearing on the loss of human and productive capital; the conduct of national policies and the setting of national development priorities; and on the nature of international aid and bilateral assistance strategies and programs of donor countries. In order to ensure the efficacy and appropriateness of their support for disaster survivors, international agencies, humanitarian and disaster relief organizations, scholars, non-governmental organizations, and members of the global emergency management community need to have insight into best practices and lessons learned from various disasters across national and cultural boundaries. The evidence obtained from the numerous case studies in this volume serves to build a worldwide community that is better informed about the cultural and traditional contexts of such disasters and better enabled to prepare for, respond to, and finally rebuild sustainable communities after disasters in different environments. The main themes of the case studies include: • the need for community planning and emergency management to unite in order to achieve the mutual aim of creating a sustainable disaster-resilient community, coupled with the necessity to enact and implement appropriate laws, policies, and development regulations for disaster risk reduction; • the need to develop a clear set of urban planning and urban design principles for improving the built environment’s capacities for disaster risk management through the integration of disaster risk reduction education into the curricula of colleges and universities; • the need to engage the whole community to build inclusive governance structures as prerequisites for addressing climate change vulnerability and fostering resilience and sustainability. Furthermore, the case studies explore the need to link the existence and value of scientific knowledge accumulated in various countries with decision-making in disaster risk management; and the relevance and transferability from one cultural context to another of the lessons learned in building institutional frameworks for whole community partnerships.

Current risk management approaches may be insufficient to prepare for future disasters, particularly where hazards overlap. Integrated approaches have potential to be more impactful, stretching limited resources further. Building a Resilient Canada examines current practices and emerging actions to reduce vulnerability and exposure to natural hazards through the integration of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction (DRR). These actions are diverse but rest on a common foundation of accessible and up-to-date information, sufficient funding and insurance incentives, and coordinated and collaborative governance.

Natural disasters-including hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods-caused more than 220,000 deaths worldwide in the first half of 2010 and wreaked havoc on homes, buildings, and the environment. To withstand and recover from natural and human-caused disasters, it is essential that citizens and communities work together to anticipate threats, limit their effects, and rapidly restore functionality after a crisis. Increasing evidence indicates that collaboration between the private and public sectors could improve the ability of a community to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. Several previous National Research Council reports have identified specific examples of the private and public sectors working cooperatively to reduce the effects of a disaster by implementing building codes, retrofitting buildings, improving community education, or issuing extreme-weather warnings. State and federal governments have acknowledged the importance of collaboration between private and public organizations to develop planning for disaster preparedness and response. Despite growing ad hoc experience across the country, there is currently no comprehensive framework to guide private-public collaboration focused on disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. Building Community Disaster Resilience through Private-Public Collaboration assesses the current state of private-public sector collaboration dedicated to strengthening community resilience, identifies gaps in knowledge and practice, and recommends research that could be targeted for investment. Specifically, the book finds that local-level private-public collaboration is essential to the development of community resilience. Sustainable and effective resilience-focused private-public collaboration is dependent on several basic principles that increase communication among all sectors of the community, incorporate flexibility into collaborative networks, and encourage regular reassessment of collaborative missions, goals, and practices.

Whilst it is impossible to make resistant urban growth, resilience is becoming more widely accepted and urban systems must be resilient enough to cope with the climate related hazards. This book highlights the issues of resilience through regional, national, city and community-based studies.

This book critically examines the global diffusion and local reception of resilience through the implementation of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) programmes in Pacific and Caribbean island states. Global efforts to strengthen local disaster resilience capacities have become a staple of international development activity in recent decades, yet the successful implementation of DRR projects designed to strengthen local resilience remains elusive. While there are pockets of success, a gap remains between global expectations and local realities. Through a critical realist study of global and local worldviews of resilience in the Pacific and Caribbean islands, this book argues that the global advocacy of DRR remains inadequate because of a failure to prioritise a person-orientated ethics in its conceptualization of disaster resilience. This regional comparison provides a valuable lens to understand the underlying social structures that makes resilience possible and the extent to which local governments, communities and persons interpret and modify their behaviour on risk when faced with the global message on resilience. This book will be of much interest to students of resilience, risk management, development studies, and area studies.