Improving the Nation's Resilience to Disasters

Abstract

A recent report by the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) [2012] argues that increasing the nation's resilience to hazards and disasters is a “national imperative.” Escalating disaster losses and the increasing frequency of billion‐dollar loss events such as Hurricane Sandy portend an unsustainable future—one that the nation can ill afford. Disaster losses are occurring at a time of record unemployment, national debt, increasing disparities between the rich and poor, and major population shifts to coastal and other hazardous environments. Environmental degradation of many of the natural defenses against floods, storm surge, and wildfires continues unabated. The result is that routine events begin to have extreme consequences, and climate change may cause such events to become more intense, with even greater impacts and graver consequences than we have seen up to now [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2012].

Geographies of resilience

“…In the USA, eight federal agencies and one community resilience group affiliated with a National Laboratory asked the National Research Council (NRC) to recommend necessary approaches to increase national resilience to disasters (The National Academies, 2012: 1). Subsequently, the NRC study committee is currently undertaking efforts to: (1) define 'national resilience' and frame the main issues related to increasing resilience in the USA; (2) provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience; (3) describe the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters; and (4) outline additional information, data, gaps and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation's resilience to disasters (see also Cutter and Zoback, 2013). It is encouraging to see both definitional discussions and operational approaches, but the framing of the recommendations is technocratic, being heavy on quantitative data while not acknowledging wide swathes of qualitative research with solid evidence for the success of resilience endeavours, e.g.…”

Enhancement of resilience and quality of cold supply chain under the disruptions caused by COVID-19: A case of a developing country

“…A resilient and sustainable CSC must be able to recover from the unknown threats and must adapt according to the sudden changes in the processes and the disruptions caused by the pandemic ( Golan et al, 2020 ). It must be able to coincide with the definition of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for resilience that states that a supply chain must have the ability to plan and organize, absorb the negative impacts, recuperate from them and more importantly, adapt accordingly to the ambiguous events ( Cutter and Zoback, 2013 ). The organizations have to design their policies according to the definition to ensure that the CSC remains resilient and sustainable under unknown circumstances for which the strategies can be defined that are discussed in the next section.…”

A conceptual model to assess stress‐associated health effects of multiple ecosystem services degraded by disaster events in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere

“…This act is the primary legislation that controls how the U.S. manages, responds to, determines responsibility for, and assesses damages resulting from oil spills. Perhaps even more importantly, policy for dealing with human health impacts of disasters tends to be primarily focused on reactive, after-the-event responses [Cutter and Zoback, 2013; Lurie et al, 2013].…”