Resilience News

According to recently released data from California’s Water Resource Board, approximately 700,000 California residents are being exposed to contaminated tap…

Community resilience requires action. And in communities “action is at the speed of trust” (Sherri Moore of the USACE). As I’ve pointed out before, trust must be based on shared experiences, shared successes, a shared vision. Eugene Tan in Singapore calls this a “Master Narrative” – a common understanding of who we are, and how we’ve come to be. Let me make it clear up front that the Master Narrative and a call for action aren’t the same. You want your community to become more resilient – that’s the purpose of a call for action. But if that call is to be translated from words to action, your community has to believe in itself enough to take action. That’s where the Master Narrative comes in – one of the thing it must do is inspire confidence that “Yes, we can.” Thus, an effective call for action will have echoes of the Master Narrative embedded in it.

This past Friday, Northeastern University’s John D. O’Bryant African American Institute hosted a screening and community discussion of the film Cooked: Survival by Zip Code, produced and directed by Judith Hefland. The film details the conditions of the 1995 Chicago heat wave, where underlying social inequities amplified the tragic outcome of the disaster. The screening was followed by a panel discussion, moderated by GRI Founding Director Steve Flynn, where participants explained the importance of community resilience that works towards social advancement in order to better address social injustices. 

In the midst of the horror that played out last week at the Route 91 Country Music Festival in Las Vegas, communities mobilized to provide support for victims of the mass shooting. Even as the bullets showered upon the crowd, stories emerged of countless concertgoers and first responders risking their lives to evacuate the wounded and stranded. 

Typhoon Damrey ripped through South-Central Vietnam on November 4, making it the 12th major storm to hit Vietnam this year. With wind speeds of up to 135 km/hour and a reported death toll of 106, Damrey is the strongest storm to hit the region in a decade. More than 116,000 houses were damaged or completely razed, and destroyed roads caused traffic issues across much of the region. Quang Ngai Province reported the most rain and experienced numerous landslides that left five mountainous regions in complete isolation for five days. This destruction came amidst the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit, which was hosted in Da Nang, Vietnam last week.

The impact of COVID-19 can be felt in every facet of modern society. From sky high unemployment, to the practice…

In previous installments of this week's blog series on leveraging Opportunity Zones to build infrastructure resilience, the Global Resilience Institute has examined several cases in which the failure or prolonged disruption of privately held infrastructure can pose serious - and expensive - challenges for the public. With all of our critical systems so in inextricably connected, local disasters can quickly cascade into national crises when the 'weak link' is something like a freight rail route that connects the largest port in the US to customers across the country or a pharmaceutical manufacturing hub that is the sole producer of some of the country's most at-risk products. For many people located in disaster afflicted areas, though, the reliance on private infrastructure means that their livelihoods and property are directly linked to the resilience of those systems. This will continue to be the case for new capital investments spurred on by Opportunity Zones. Fund managers across the country lining up to invest in the zones have an imperative to put money into projects that 'bake-in' resilience, both to protect their investments, but also to ensure the communities they are located among are not splintered when a disruption inevitably occurs. The importance of infrastructure that is able to bounce back from stress can clearly be seen in several cases where it did not.

In this article by Supply Chain Brain, Global Resilience Institute director Dr. Stephen Flynn discusses the recent bridge collapse in Baltimore.

Have you ever tried to convince your boss, your spouse, or someone else about something? And found your blood pressure rising as you thought to yourself “Why can’t he / she keep an open mind?” You may have been a victim of the other person’s cognitive biases (of course there’s always the possibility that you were wrong!). When we receive new information, we try to fit it into our existing mental models – the patterns that we have formed to help us organize information. These patterns are important and useful because they help us rapidly respond to warnings. However, sometimes our existing mental models act as barriers to incoming information, especially if the new information doesn’t fit into an existing pattern very well. This is known as cognitive bias. Community leaders are human. They are just as subject to cognitive bias as anyone else. As a result they may under- or overestimate risks facing the community, or ignore potential solutions to the community’s problems, or accept “solutions” that simply won’t work. Thus, cognitive bias can have profound impacts on a community’s resilience. In this post, I want to explore some common kinds of cognitive bias in a community context.

Following an intensification over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Michael left coastal towns in a state of complete obliteration. Now ranked as one of the four most powerful hurricanes to ever hit the United States, Michael tore through the Florida Panhandle last Wednesday, October 10, with sustained wind speeds of up to 155 miles per hour. Paired with heavy rain, this resulted in peak storm surge of 9 to 14 feet, which wrenched walls off houses and completely inundated coastal areas.

After the devastating impact of Hurricane Sandy on New York City in 2012, officials have been looking for solutions to prepare for the next hurricane and other extreme weather events. In 2014, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio launched the Mayor’s Office of Resiliency (MOR) and in 2017, The New York New Jersey Harbor and Tributaries (HATS) focus area feasibility study was launched in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to evaluate five possible defenses against severe storms and flooding that pose threats to the communities along the harbor.

As the impacts of climate change become increasingly apparent, it has also become increasingly clear that those who are most disadvantaged will be some of the most affected. One concern is “climate gentrification” -- a growing concept in which some properties become more valuable than others due to their ability to better accommodate settlement and infrastructure in the face of climate change. Climate gentrification has some of the same negative impacts as gentrification, where lower-income people may be pushed out of their neighborhoods by rising rents and pressure from developers who seek to build property on desirable land.