Resilience Is A Growing Business

Resilience is a growing business. The number of researchers and centers studying resilience in one way or another has blossomed over the past two years. The number of federal agencies with resilience initiatives or divisions working in resilience policy grows daily. All of these are worthwhile efforts and will clearly help the nation focus on the important task of ensuring that we can better recover from significant disturbances to the fabric of our society no matter the scale or cause. The more we know as the result of evidence-based research and the more that we create policy and procedures for multi-disciplined, cross-sectional response and recovery, the better America will be able to protect itself from large scale disruptions.

Unfortunately, most of the research efforts remain largely uncoordinated. While the numerous conferences, workshops and symposia serve an important function for sharing information, they tend toward examining focused aspects of resilience and do not shed light on the overall state of resilience research nor do they identify research gaps and requirements in a way useful to government, academic, or scientific organizations seeking to sponsor work in resilience.

Similarly there is no federal interagency process for resilience. Nothing better demonstrates this than an examination of the various federal agency definitions of resilience and even the different ways the definitions are expressed and applied within a single agency. Agencies are developing resilience plans and applying resilience resources with no common policy framework to ensure that these resources and organizational efforts are effective.

There is evidence to suggest that this challenge is recognized. The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) recently organized Regional Consortium Coordinating Council (RCCC), an effort by the Office of Infrastructure Protection to bring together regional organizations that are attempting to work significant interdependency issues, is clearly a step in the right direction. Last year’s two-day symposium for researchers by the DHS, Science and Technology Directorate, University Programs Division attempted to survey the field of resilience research although there has been no identifiable follow-up to document either results or a coordinated way forward. The need for coordination remains.

CARRI intends to try to help with a very small part of the research challenge. Collaborating with other centers and institutes who work in this field, we will convene a day-long workshop for researchers in conjunction with the Annual Natural Hazards Workshop in Colorado this summer. We are excited that Director Kathleen Tierney and the staff of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder have graciously agreed to work with CARRI in convening this workshop. We are in the process now of working with a group of associates from other centers to define an agenda that will assist in surveying the current state of thinking about community resilience and identify significant research needs. I will provide more information in subsequent postings as the agenda develops.