Two Brief Thoughts

June 19th, 2009 - Warren Edwards

When CARRI began its investigation into the status of resilience thinking, research and policy development, the idea of resilience was not a concept in good standing at the Department of Homeland Security or in the White House. While there was growing energy among outside groups around the concept of resilience as an alternative to protection (see CARRI’s May 5, 2009 blog posting), the discussions were very limited and frequently somewhat acrimonious. It seems clear, however, that the landscape is shifting rapidly. The President has announced that there will be an office within the Homeland Security Council for resilience. Secretary Napolitano speaks of making the federal government an “engaged facilitator of long-term community recovery.” The designee to be Undersecretary of Homeland Security for Science and Technology, Dr. Tara O’Toole has made community resilience one of her primary goals. Resilience appears to be not just a concept in good standing but is quickly becoming a focus of policy thought. I think this is good.

There is apparently some confusion about what CARRI means by a common framework for community resilience (see CARRI’s May 18, 2009 blog posting). This confusion is generating a healthy internal discussion. In an effort to broaden that discussion, I offer my first draft of a definition.

COMMON FRAMEWORK FOR COMMUNITY DISASTER RESILIENCE: a widely accepted, coherent, measurable, way of understanding community disaster resilience and applying that understanding to a community in a meaningful way. A common framework would include objective, measurable, commonly accepted indicators; a practical assessment methodology to fairly, transparently and accurately assess the ability to return to normal; and processes facilitated by validated tools that allow the results of the assessment to be translated into actions that increase a community’s resilience.

Comments welcome!

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Resiliency IS Protection

May 5th, 2009 - Warren Edwards

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. read the entire article >

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Resilience Is A Growing Business

April 6th, 2009 - Warren Edwards

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. read the entire article >

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Community and Regional Resilience Institute Blog — Come Read and Learn about CARRI

February 13th, 2009 - Warren Edwards

Welcome to the Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) Blog. A new feature of the Institute, we hope that this site will serve two purposes – 1) to promote discussion among community practitioners and the Institute staff on ideas, practices and processes being developed to assist communities to become more resilient and 2) to enhance communication among other similarly focused centers. We welcome your ideas and your questions. We will provide answers where we can and assist you in finding answers where we need to learn with you.

For those not familiar with our Institute — In early 2007 the Department of Homeland Security suggested the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) look at “resilience” as part of the congressionally mandated Southeast Region Research Initiative (SERRI). With some considerable doubt and uncertainty, we began a fairly comprehensive examination to determine what the term resilience meant in the context of homeland security.

Our initial investigations took the form of engaging a wide spectrum of individuals, organizations, and governmental entities. We talked to anyone with experience who would talk to us – over one hundred experts and practitioners from government, private industry, academia and non-governmental groups – about the state and direction of resiliency. read the entire article >

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