Food insecurity threatens resilience

The ability to have a stable and reliable supply of food is an important indicator of resilience. Establishing food security is a concern for public officials, community leaders, families and individuals across the globe. Often, populations which do not have reliable access to food are made vulnerable to a host of other conditions which threaten their resilience. Lack of affordability and physical access to food are two of the primary reasons families and communities in the United States struggle to maintain a reliable, nutritious diet.

Florida nursing home deaths spur efforts to protect elderly

Emergency workers around hurricane-scarred Florida worked to make sure elderly residents were safe, evacuating multiple assisted-living facilities, after eight people died in a sweltering nursing home that lost its air conditioning in the storm. In one of the latest actions to protect older residents, firefighters helped relocate 122 people late Wednesday from two assisted living centers near Orlando that had been without power since Hurricane Irma.

Floods and landslides kill 54, leave 39 missing in Vietnam

Vietnam is ranked the seventh most disaster-prone country in the world, and disasters over the past two decades have caused more than 13,000 deaths and property damage in excess of $6.4 billion, according to Achim Fock, acting country director for the World Bank in Vietnam. Speaking at a conference in Hanoi on Friday marking International Day for Disaster Reduction, Fock said it is time for Vietnam to prepare seriously to reduce its climatic vulnerability.

Five killed and thousands displaced after fire rips through Kijiji slum in Nairobi

On January 28, 2018, a fire engulfed the entirety of the Kijiji slum in the Lang’ata neighborhood of Nairobi, near the Southlands estate. The blaze resulted in the death of five people. Due to the informality of the settlement, estimates of the number of displaced people vary, but CNN approximates the total to be around 6,000. The governor of Nairobi, Mike Sonko, called for a full investigation of the fire, accompanied by a tweet that claimed that "those found guilty will face the full force of the law." The cause of the fire has yet to be determined. and efforts to control the blaze have been highly criticized. Firefighters reportedly arrived within minutes, but according to the Kenya Red Cross, it took eight hours to contain the fire. This was due to a number of compounding factors, including a lack of access roads throughout the slum, and an insufficient amount of water.

Fires in the Amazon threaten ecological resilience

The Amazon rain-forest, the world’s largest rain-forest, is currently experiencing some of the worst fires in its history. A new government administration in Brazil has prioritized economic growth over environmental policy, making the region more susceptible to disaster and threatening environmental resilience. The forest may soon reach a “tipping point”, where it is no longer able to bounce back and recover from this kind of destruction.

Finding resilience in post-Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico

How do you define resilience? From the very beginning, this question has animated our project, Interrogating Resilience: An Analysis of Inequality and Vulnerability Pre-Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico. In our initial research visit to Puerto Rico in June, we discovered the complex manifestations of resilience as reflected in community-managed aqueducts high up in Puerto Rico’s mountains; community centers providing much-needed food, electricity, and human resources in the wake of the storm; and, of course, the thousands of people who have chosen to stay in Puerto Rico after Maria, a devastating Category 4 hurricane with winds of 155 MPH, made landfall there in September of 2017.[1] Our close colleagues, Marla Perez and Cecilio Ortiz, directors of the Institute for Sustainable Energy (INESI) at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), graciously curated our initial investigatory visit to Puerto Rico, where we began to scratch out an understanding of Puerto Rico’s resilience.