LAUNCHING A NATIONAL CONVERSATION ON
Disaster Resilience
IN AMERICA
WORKSHOP SUMMARY
Peggy Tsai, Rapporteur
Committee on Increasing National Resilience to Hazards and Disasters
Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy
THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES
THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS
Washington, D.C.
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NOTICE: The project that is the subject of this report was approved by the Governing Board of the National Research Council, whose members are drawn from the councils of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The members of the committee responsible for the report were chosen for their special competences and with regard for appropriate balance.
This study was supported by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers under award number W912HQ-10-C-0071, U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service under award number 09-DG-11221637'351, U.S. Department of Energy under award number DE-PI0000010, U.S. Department of Commerce National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under award number DG-133R-08CQ0062, Department of Homeland Security under award number HSHQDC-10-C-00087, Department of Homeland Security Federal Emergency Management Agency under award number HSFEHQ-11-C-1642, Department of the Interior U.S. Geological Survey under award number G104P00079, National Aeronautics and Space Administration under award number NNXIOAN3IG, and Community and Regional Resilience Institute under award number 4000090613. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organizations or agencies that provided support for the project.
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THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES
Advisers to the Nation on Science, Engineering, and Medicine
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Committee on Increasing National Resilience To Hazards and Disasters
Susan L. Cutter (Chair), Carolina Distinguished Professor and Director, Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute, University of South Carolina
Maj. Gen. Joseph A. Ahearn (retired), Senior Vice President, CH2M HILL Ltd
Bernard Amadei, Professor of Civil Engineering, Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, University of Colorado at Boulder
Patrick Crawford, Director of Disaster Services, Feeding America
Gerald E. Galloway, Jr., Glenn L. Martin Institute Professor of Engineering University of Maryland
Michael F. Goodchild, Professor, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara
Howard C. Kunreuther, Professor of Decision Sciences and Business Economics and Public Policy, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania
Meredith Li-Vollmer, Risk Communication Specialist at Public Health Seattle and King County
Monica Schoch-Spana, Senior Associate, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Susan C. Scrimshaw, President, The Sage Colleges
Ellis M. Stanley, Sr., Executive Vice President, Hammerman & Gainer International
Gene Whitney, Independent Consultant, Washington, District of Columbia
Mary Lou Zoback, Consulting Professor, Stanford University, Stanford, California
Staff
Lauren Alexander-Augustine, Associate Executive Director, Division on Earth and Life Studies, and Director, Disasters Roundtable
Elizabeth A. Eide, Director, Board on Earth Sciences and Resources, and Study
Director
Neeraj P. Gorkhaly, Research Associate
Eric J. Edkin, Senior Program Assistant
Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy
Richard N. Zare (Chair), Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science, Department of Chemistry, Stanford University
Linda M. Abriola (ex-officio), Dean of Engineering, Tufts University
Claude R. Canizares, Vice President for Research and Associate Provost and Bruno Rossi Professor of Experimental Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Moses H. W. Chan, Evan Pugh Professor of Physics, Pennsylvania State University
Ralph J. Cicerone (ex-officio), President, National Academy of Sciences
Paul Citron, Vice President (Retired), Technology Policy and Academic Relations, Medtronic, Inc.
Ruth A. David, President and Chief Executive Officer, ANSER (Analytic Services, Inc.)
Harvey V. Fineberg (ex-officio), President, Institute of Medicine
C. Dan Mote, Jr. (ex-officio), President Emeritus and Glenn Martin Institute Professor of Engineering, University of Maryland
Percy A. Pierre, Vice President and Professor Emeritus, Michigan State University
E. Albert Reece, Vice President for Medical Affairs, Bowers Distinguished Professor and Dean, School of Medicine, University of Maryland
Susan C. Scrimshaw, President, The Sage Colleges
William J. Spencer, Chairman Emeritus, SEMATECH
Michael S. Turner, Rauner Distinguished Service Professor, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, The University of Chicago
Charles M. Vest (ex-officio), President, National Academy of Engineering
Nancy S. Wexler, Higgins Professor of Neuropsychology, Columbia University
Staff
Kevin Finneran, Director
Tom Arrison, Program Officer
Neeraj P. Gorkhaly, Research Associate
Marion Ramsey, Administrative Associate
Preface
Resilience is a word often used to describe people, cities, or nations who demonstrate strength and coping skills to recover from adverse conditions. With the increasing frequency of natural and human-induced disasters and the increasing magnitude of their consequences, it is clear that governments and communities need to become more resilient. The National Research Council brought together a committee of experts to address the importance of resilience, discuss different challenges and approaches for building resilience, and outline steps for implementing resilience efforts in communities and within government (see Box P-1 for the committee’s statement of task for the consensus report and its recommendations). The committee’s report Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative (The National Academies, 2012), serves as a central reference for understanding resilience, the current state of the nation’s resilience to disasters, and ways in which the nation can move on a path toward greater resilience. The report was also a basis for a one-day workshop on November 30, 2012 in Washington, DC, that formally launched a national conversation on resilience designed to engage individuals, the public, and government officials in considering and implementing national disaster resilience (see Agenda in Appendix A). This document is a summary of that one-day workshop. This workshop consisted of a morning event to formally launch the release of the committee’s report, and afternoon breakout sessions to further examine some of the committee’s recommendations in detail. Although the one-day workshop could not cover all of the many aspects of disaster resilience important to the nation or the meeting participants, the effort to draw upon the expertise of a diverse set of speakers, panelists, and participants was designed to provide engaged and informed input to ongoing resilience discussions that could translate into resilience-building actions.
Box P-1
Increasing National Resilience to Hazards and Disasters Statement of Task
An ad hoc committee overseen collaboratively by the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy and the Disasters Roundtable will conduct a study and issue a consensus report that integrates information from the natural, physical, technical, economic, and social sciences to identify ways to increase national resilience to hazards and disasters in the United States. In this context, “national resilience” includes resilience at federal, state and local community levels. The committee will:
-Define “national resilience” and frame the primary issues related to increasing national resilience to hazards and disasters in the United States;
-Provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for resilience at the U.S. national level;
-Describe the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters in the United States;
-Outline additional information or data and gaps and obstacles to action that need to be addressed in order to increase resilience to hazards and disasters in the United States; and
-Present conclusions and recommendations about what approaches are needed to elevate national resilience to hazards and disasters in the United States.
Recommendations
Recommendation 1: Federal government agencies should incorporate national resilience as a guiding principle to inform the mission and actions of the federal government and the programs it supports at all levels.
Recommendation 2: The public and private sectors in a community should work cooperatively to encourage commitment to and investment in a risk management strategy that includes complementary structural and nonstructural risk-reduction and risk-spreading measures or tools. Such tools might include an essential framework (codes, standards, and guidelines) that drives the critical structural functions of resilience and investment in risk-based pricing of insurance.
Recommendation 3: A national resource of disaster-related data should be established that documents injuries, loss of life, property loss, and impacts on economic activity. Such a database will support efforts to develop more quantitative risk models and better understand structural and social vulnerability to disasters.
Recommendation 4: The Department of Homeland Security in conjunction with other federal agencies, state and local partners, and professional groups should develop a National Resilience Scorecard.
Recommendation 5: Federal, state, and local governments should support the creation and maintenance of broad-based community resilience coalitions at local and regional levels.
Recommendation 6: All federal agencies should ensure that they are promoting and coordinating national resilience in their programs and policies. A resilience policy review and self-assessment within agencies and strong communication among agencies are keys to achieving this kind of coordination.
The morning segment of the November 30 event included framing remarks, keynote presentations, and a series of panel discussions with nationally recognized experts in disaster resilience (Chapters 1 and 2). These experts discussed developing a culture of resilience, implementing resilience, and understanding federal perspectives about resilience in light of Superstorm Sandy, which had occurred just a few weeks before the November 30 meeting. Although interest in Sandy was very keen, the input to the meeting provided by the participants included a broad range of perspectives and experiences derived from many types of hazards and disasters in all parts of the country. Chapter 1 summarizes the opening and framing remarks of the event while Chapter 2 summarizes the morning keynote presentations and panel discussions.
For the afternoon discussions, attendees were invited for their expertise across the physical and social sciences, economics, engineering, and public health and their range of experiences from government, non-profit organizations, academia, and the private sector. These invited attendees participated in breakout sessions that focused on various topics that would build upon three of the recommendations from the National Academies (2012) report: development and implementation of a national resilience measurement tool; risk management; and building community coalitions to support resilience. Chapter 3 summarizes the workshop breakout sessions and provides possible next steps for realizing a national vision for resilience.
This report has been prepared by the workshop rapporteur as a factual summary of what occurred at the workshop. The planning committee’s role was limited to planning and convening the workshop. The views contained in the report are those of individual workshop participants and do not necessarily represent the views of all workshop participants, the planning committee, or the National Research Council.
The webcast for the entire event is archived on this website: http://nassites.org/resilience/Resilience-Events/. The website also includes brief video interviews with keynote speakers, panelists, and committee members.
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Acknowledgments
In addition to the expertise provided by the Committee on Increasing National Resilience to Hazards and Disasters in helping to organize the November 30 disaster resilience event, the committee relied on input from the study sponsors and other professionals interested in disaster resilience. We gratefully acknowledge these individuals and organizations for their assistance in helping to ensure that the plenary program and afternoon workshops were informative and dynamic. We thank the study committee members: Susan Cutter; Joseph “Bud” Ahearn; Bernard Amadei; Patrick Crawford; Gerald Galloway, Jr.; Michael Goodchild; Howard Kunreuther; Meredith Li-Vollmer; Monica Schoch-Spana; Susan Scrimbshaw; Ellis Stanley, Sr.; Gene Whitney; and Mary Lou Zoback. The study’s sponsors were also of great help in putting plans in place for the event. We thank our study sponsors: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Commerce National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Homeland Security and Federal Emergency Management Agency, Department of the Interior U.S. Geological Survey, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory/Community and Regional Resilience Institute.
The program itself was filled with individuals who graciously contributed their time, thought, and expertise to helping the audience truly engage in the resilience conversation. The program would not have been a success without presentations from Richard Reed, Admiral Thad Allen, Natalie Jayroe, Stephen Flynn, Mayor Tom Tait, Debra Ballen, Linda Langston, Assistant Administrator Corey Gruber, Assistant Secretary Patricia Hoffman, Assistant Secretary Nicole Lurie, and Assistant Secretary Kathryn Sullivan. Direct contributions to the plenary session from committee members Susan Cutter, Gerald Galloway, Jr., Ellis Stanley, Sr., and Gene Whitney, as well as
from Richard Bissell, Executive Director of the National Research Council’s Policy and Global Affairs Division, and Lauren Alexander Augustine, Director of the Disasters Roundtable and Associate Executive Director in the Division on Earth and Life Studies, were also essential. The success of the morning session was fully assured by the ease with which Miles O’Brien adeptly guided the panel discussion and audience engagement, injecting humor and critical thought to develop a real conversation about the important topic of national resilience.
A large undertaking like the November 30 event could not have occurred at all without the highly professional attention to numerous levels of detail from a National Research Council staff team. These individuals are gratefully acknowledged for their many contributions before, during, and after the event: Camilla Ables, John Brown, Richard-Duane Chambers, Maria Dahlberg, Edward Dunlea, Eric Edkin, Rebecca Fischler, Sherrie Forrest, Courtney Gibbs, Neeraj Gorkhaly, Chanda Ijames, William Kearney, Mark Lange, Claudia Mengelt, and Lauren Rugani.
This report has been reviewed in draft form by individuals chosen for their diverse perspectives and technical expertise, in accordance with procedures approved by the National Academies’ Report Review Committee. The purpose of this independent review is to provide candid and critical comments that will assist the institution in making its published report as sound as possible and to ensure that the report meets institutional standards for quality and objectivity. The review comments and draft manuscript remain confidential to protect the integrity of the process.
We wish to thank the following individuals for their review of this report: Arrietta Chakos, Urban Resilience Strategies; Ana Maria Jones, CARD (Collaborating Agencies Responding to Disasters); Christopher Poland, Degenkolb Engineers; and Gene Whitney, Independent consultant.
Although the reviewers listed above have provided many constructive comments and suggestions, they were not asked to endorse the content of the report, nor did they see the final draft before its release. The review of this report was overseen by Mary Clutter, National Science Foundation (Retired). Appointed by the National Academies, she was responsible for making certain that an independent examination of this report was carried out in accordance with institutional procedures and that all review comments were carefully considered. Responsibility for the final content of this report rests entirely with the rapporteur and the institution.
Peggy Tsai, Rapporteur
Elizabeth Eide, Study Director