Tag Archives: climate

Resilience Defined and Practiced

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DSCF1077As I write this today, representatives of 190 nations are in Paris apparently have reached a historic consensus on a new climate agreement. Because I am not there and you will read about it in the news soon enough, this article is not about that agreement, but about the very practical concept of community resilience. No matter what the nations of the world decide, communities must face the very real impacts of climate change and of all natural disasters facing them. I am going to rely heavily on a lecture I delivered on October 22 at Iowa State University as a guest of its lecture series.

Before discussing resilience, however, I want to underscore the urgent reasons why the world has been gathered in Paris for the past two weeks, even in the face of security scares arising from terrorist activities there over the past year. The theory that greenhouse gases affect global temperatures by trapping the sun’s heat that would otherwise radiate back into space has been around since the late 19th century. In 1958, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography began measuring the concentration of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. At the time, it was already at 316 parts per million, above the historic level of 280 preceding the modern industrial age, in which we have pumped huge quantities of greenhouse gases into the air through the burning of fossil fuels. The level has climbed steadily ever since and has just recently passed 400. Scientists have already determined that 350 is the highest safe level for maintaining global temperatures within the evolutionary range of human history. Thus, we scramble to find ways to slow the rise and eventually return to that level, which prevailed around 1988. As we cope with the impacts of these higher levels with increased weather volatility and sea level rise, the need for communities to adapt to the new circumstances has become increasingly compelling and urgent. Some are clearly more ready than others for a variety of reasons, including governmental capacity and political will.

The concept of resilience is at the center of much current practice and discussion in the field of disaster recovery, but it is actually much broader. The Rockefeller Foundation has been arguing that it really relates not only to shocks—events that present immediate threats such as natural disasters—but also to chronic stressors, which can be forces that strain the resources of a community over an extended period of time, such as high crime, pollution, or poverty. Certainly, the inability to cope with those chronic stresses can set up a community for much more calamitous response in the face of sudden shocks. Rockefeller, however, is using the concept of resilience in reference to cities in its 100 Resilient Cities program, and some other uses may demand different frameworks for the issue.

In the lecture at Iowa State University, “Holistic Approaches to a Resilient Future,” I undertook a quick overview of some of the definitions of resilience that span the different perspectives within which it has been used. I’d like here to focus on those definitions and some closing comments that followed them.

While stating that my overview did not necessarily contain the best or the most definitive definitions, I suggested it was at least a representative sample. I started by noting that the concept largely originated in the field of ecology, the study of natural systems, and offered this definition from the Stockholm Resilience Centre:

Ecosystem resilience is a measure of how much disturbance (like storms, fire or pollutants) an ecosystem can handle without shifting into a qualitatively different state. It is like the capacity of a system to both withstand shocks and surprises and to rebuild itself if damaged.

Nature left to itself tends to repair the damage from storms and natural events, but we have often compromised the ecosystems that support us, such that they do not recover as well or at all in the face of major shocks. But the concept of resilience has also been applied to engineered, or physical, systems, and I then offered this definition from a professional reference work, Resilience Engineering in Practice:

The intrinsic ability of a system to adjust its functioning prior to, during, or following changes and disturbances, so that it can sustain required operations under both expected and unexpected conditions.

Here, the focus is not on the resilience of nature itself, but on our ability to create or design systems that are capable of continuing to function in the face of adverse circumstances.

But can people themselves be resilient? Obviously, the answer is yes, and we frequently talk about individuals in that way, but what about whole communities or groups? The Stockholm Resilience Centre offers a different definition in a social context:

Social resilience is the ability of human communities to withstand and recover from stresses, such as environmental change or social, economic, or political upheaval. Resilience in societies and their life-supporting ecosystems is crucial in maintaining options for future human development.

The point is that, while communities tend to have their own ethos and unique human resources, they are not naturally self-governing. Governance in fact is a well-learned art that involves leadership by some, passive acceptance by others, and many shades of involvement in between. Can governance itself be resilient? I offered the following definition offered by some urban planning scholars in a 2009 article in the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management (52 (6): 739-56:

Instead of repeated damage and continual demands for federal disaster assistance, resilient communities proactively protect themselves against hazards, build self-sufficiency, and become more sustainable. Resilience is the capacity to absorb severe shock and return to a desired state following a disaster. It involves technical, organizational, social, and economic dimensions. It is fostered not only by government, but also by individual, organization, and business actions.

By then, I felt the audience might be struggling to keep track of the many nuances embedded in those more specific definitions, so I ended the overview with the much simpler statement that the National Academy of Sciences used in its landmark 2012 report, Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative. It defined resilience as simply

the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events.

I then noted that resilience bears an important relationship to the concept of sustainability, which gained prominence following a 1988 United Nations report, Our Common Future. Borrowing from what I wrote in our own APA Planning Advisory Service Report from a year ago, Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation, I stated that fundamentally, resilience allows a community to respond to and recover effectively from specific events; sustainability is a frame of reference that aims to preserve for future generations the resources and opportunities that exist for current generations. Resilience can help to ensure that those resources and opportunities are not squandered through poor preparation for adverse events. It is not in and of itself, however, a broad enough framework for the more long-term goals of truly visionary planning. The two concepts need to work hand in hand.

It is important to understand some of what stands in the way of building resilient communities, so I spent a few minutes summarizing some key points in this regard:

  • Lack of trust in government. I noted that the source of distrust can be very different, ranging from historic racial and social inequities to a deliberate view of government as the enemy. The former, I noted, was a huge factor in recovery from Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, where a host of such inequities poisoned the atmosphere and sometimes undermined planning. The latter is typified by the Tea Party and similar conservative movements, where the aim often seems to be to undermine faith in government by making it incapable of effective response. Exactly how that leads us to any sort of positive future has never been clear to me.
  • Procrastination. Human beings are capable of a good deal of denial, and the willingness to postpone actions to address vulnerabilities that may not be exposed in a mayor’s term of office is rampant in local government. Yet there are statesmen among us who care about their legacy and perceive the need for action to reduce a community’s level of risk. I closed by borrowing a slide from Abby Finis, of the Great Plains Institute, who had concluded a presentation earlier in October at the Sustainable Communities Network annual conference in Dubuque, Iowa, by quoting me from the PAS Report cited above: “It is impossible to know when a community’s moment of truth will come, but procrastination clearly isn’t a viable option.”

All of this points to a need for visionary champions, whether they be citizen activists or political leaders, who will advocate for better planning for resilience on a sustained basis. These people tend to foster inclusive dialogue to help bring the public aboard with a heightened understanding of the problems their communities face and who then help create the very success stories we need to inspire others. Rebecca Solnit talks about such people in her inspiring book, A Paradise Built in Hell.

But there is nothing terribly new about this. Communities faced with disaster have been rising to the occasion for a long time. Chicago drastically upgraded its building codes after the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, which remains a primary reason you will find so much masonry construction in the city. If we were able to learn from a disaster nearly 150 years ago, before the modern concept of resilience was even in active use, why can we not learn far more today? The object lessons are plentiful. Even before Hurricane Katrina launched a boatload of new books addressing disaster recovery, Lawrence J. Vale and Thomas J. Campanella compiled examples from around the world in The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster. What’s new is that at last we are consciously thinking about resilience before disaster, instead of waiting until it strikes. That’s important in view of the climate adaptation challenges that lie ahead.

Jim Schwab

 

 

That Burning Smell Out West

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IMG_0224Although plenty of other issues have competed for our attention in recent weeks, astute observers of the news, in the U.S. at least, have probably noticed that wildfires have been charring much of the landscape in western states, most notably along the Pacific Coast. Both California and Washington are struggling under the burden of numerous fires triggered or helped along by prolonged drought and a hot summer. While some may jump to the conclusion that this is another harbinger of climate change, and it may well have some connections to climate change, it is important to know there are other historical factors that are even more significant. We have seen them coming but not done nearly enough to forestall the outcome, which may grow worse in coming years.

Ten years ago, in Planning for Wildfires (PAS Report No. 529/530), Stuart Meck and I noted that, in the 2000 census, the five fastest-growing states all had a high propensity for wildfires. Not much has changed. Texas, which suffered significantly from wildfires during its drought in 2011, made the largest numerical gain in the 2010 census, though it was fifth in percentage gain, behind Nevada (35.1), Arizona (24.6), Utah (23.8), and Idaho (21.1). Of course, many of those people move into larger cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix. More to the point, many people continue to move specifically into more rural areas with weaker development restrictions and building codes. As their numbers rise in what fire experts call the wildland-urban interface, the area where the built environment interfaces with fire-prone wildlands, so does human and structural vulnerability to wildfires. Why do people choose to live there? Social scientists, including some who work for the U.S. Forest Service, have been examining this question for at least two decades. We noted that the reasons include a desire for proximity to wildlife, privacy, nature, and the love of a rugged lifestyle.

These desires spawn problems, however, if not accompanied by considerable prudence in both how and where homes are built, as well as in landscape maintenance once a subdivision exists. Firewise Communities, a program of the National Fire Protection Association, has since the late 1990s sought to educate communities and homeowner associations on the realities of life in the wildland-urban interface, including the need for noncombustible roofing materials, eliminating a wildfire pathway to homes and other structures by maintaining a perimeter of “defensible space,” whose radius largely depends on terrain and forest conditions, and other best practices to reduce the impact of wildfires on homes. Still, we live with the legacy of prior development in many areas, and one result is that firefighters are increasingly exposed to lethal risks in trying to protect these homes when wildfire approaches. Every year some lose their lives, 163 over the past 10 years. There is a point where some homeowners must be told that more lives cannot be risked in protecting every remote structure at any cost.

And those costs are rapidly growing. Just 20 years ago, in 1995, the Forest Service spent 16 percent of its annual budget on fire management. That has climbed to 52 percent today, and the trend is ever upward, squeezing a largely static $5 billion budget of funds for other functions. About 90 percent of the firefighting expenses involve protecting houses. It would be a far simpler matter to let some fires burn, or to use prescribed burns to reduce flammable underbrush to prevent or mitigate future fires, if fewer of those houses were in the wildland-urban interface. But part of that fire management expense is for thinning the forest to scale back a problem the Forest Service itself created over the past century, and which modern fire managers have effectively inherited. Put simply, most of the western wildland forest is much denser than it was prior to the 20th century. Not just a little bit denser, but several times denser in many cases. The result is more intensive, longer-burning wildfires in those cases where the Forest Service is unable to suppress the fire at an early stage.

Full-scale suppression, however, is what brought us to this pass. Toward the end of an era Stephen J. Pyne has called the “Great Barbecue” (1870-1920), which saw some of the deadliest wildfires in U.S. history starting with the nearly simultaneous ignitions of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, which killed about 1,500 people, and the Great Chicago Fire, which had more to do with hot weather and conditions in the lumberyards that processed the products of the upper Midwest forests than with Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, the Forest Service secured its role as the nation’s wildland firefighting service. One can learn more about the Peshtigo firestorm in a great book, Firestorm in Peshtigo, by Denise Gess and William Lutz. That era was drifting toward an end in 1910, when the Big Burn killed 78 people and scarred 3 million acres and a pitched effort to fight them put the Forest Service in the limelight and won it this new role. Timothy Egan tells that story in The Big Burn. But the collective works of Pyne, an Arizona State University environmental historian who has specialized in the history of fire, can deliver more depth than you may ever desire and fill in the blanks between those two episodes and beyond into recent times.

What we have learned is that over time, as the policy of all-out suppression of wildfires took hold in the federal government, the smaller fires that historically and naturally had served to thin the forest were no longer allowed to do their job. The gradual result was a denser, thicker forest that, when it did catch fire, produces far more dangerous fires than ever before. When drought and bark beetle infestations begin to kill some of that dense forest, the result is that there is simply far more kindling than would otherwise be there. Yet, as Forest Service Chief Tim Tidwell notes, the Forest Service currently simply does not have the resources to undertake more than a fraction of the forest restoration work needed to achieve healthier, less fire-prone forests. The problem will only grow worse with a warming climate, of course, but did not arise primarily because of it, but because of past firefighting practices and a more recent history of development in wildland areas. But climate change can be counted on to produce increasing average temperatures that will vary depending on location, but possibly 4 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. California’s Cal-Adapt has been tracking these changes and producing a stream of research and temperature maps that provide significant perspective on the extent of the problem we face moving into the future. It’s a sobering picture we would all do well to consider.

 

Jim Schwab

Discussing Drought in California

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Drought is just different from other kinds of disasters. It has a very slow onset, so slow that affected regions often do not realize they are ensnared in a prolonged drought until months or even years have passed and water supplies are severely depleted. How do we better plan for these drawn-out, stress-inducing, patience-draining tests of a community’s endurance?

Back in July, I was contacted by host Steve Baker at KVMR Radio in Nevada City, California, to join other experts on a one-hour show exploring this vital question, one that has been testing the patience and resilience of nearly 40 million Californians for the past couple of years. I joined the show from a hotel in Washington, D.C., but followed it online until I joined the discussion. Subsequently, KVMR shared the recording and allowed its use on the American Planning Association’s Recovery News blog. Two days ago we posted it, so I am linking the more than 7,500 current subscribers to this blog by offering a direct link here to the one-hour show. If the California drought concerns you, or you simply want to learn more, please listen.

Jim Schwab

Prepared for Disaster in Maui

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Paradise is not always paradise. Hawaii generally is vulnerable to a number of potential disasters, including tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, drought, and, in the case of the Big Island, volcanoes (although not of the explosive variety). The entire archipelago is nature’s creation following volcanic uplift in the middle of the ocean over millions of years of geologic time. Humans have occupied these islands for less than a millennium, after their discovery by Polynesian explorers, and Europeans only discovered them in 1776, at the time of the American Revolution, when England’s Captain Cook landed there. We are a mere blip in the evolution of the Hawaiian landscape. It is best we approach such landscapes with humility, for our own sake.

Officials in Maui County, which includes not only the island of Maui but the nearby smaller islands of Molokai, Lanai, and Kahoolawe, seem to realize as much. The best way to convey what they are doing to prepare Maui County for future hazardous events is to let them speak for themselves. In August, at the American Planning Association, we taped a podcast interview with both James Buika, a planner for the county, and Tara Owens, a coastal hazards specialist who has worked with the county on behalf of Hawaii Sea Grant. They explained the county’s planning process to prepare for future disaster recovery needs, including sensitive approaches to native cultural concerns.

Click here to listen to this 23-minute podcast.

Jim Schwab

Water: Our Public Policy Challenge

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R1-08402-021AI grew up in suburban Cleveland. After a seven-year hiatus in Iowa and briefly in Nebraska, my wife’s home state, we ended up in Chicago. I am unquestionably a Midwesterner with most of my life lived near the Great Lakes. It will therefore not be surprising that for most of my adult life, I have heard people speculate about moving some of our abundant water to places that have less, mostly in the West. For just about as long, I have been very aware that their speculations were merely pipedreams (pun very much intended).

Because most people have at most only a cursory understanding of our nation’s intricate water laws and treaties (in the case of the Great Lakes), to say nothing of the costs and challenges of water infrastructure development, I suppose they can be forgiven for their naivete in even entertaining such notions as piping water from Lake Michigan to California. For both legal and practical reasons, the water is not likely any time soon to leave the Great Lakes Basin, let alone find its way to the West Coast. Enough said.

That is all backdrop to noting that, at the moment, Lakes Michigan and Huron, which essentially share identical water levels because they are joined by a strait, are experiencing rising water levels after declining to levels well below average in 2012, in the midst of a drought and high temperatures. The lack of precipitation and high evaporation levels reduced the two lakes to 576 feet above sea level, about 2.8 feet below the average since 1918, when the Army Corps of Engineers began keeping records. All the Great Lakes tend to rise and fall over time, and somewhat in tandem because they are part of a continuous system that flows into the St. Lawrence River and out into the Atlantic Ocean. But Lake Superior is higher before it dumps into Michigan and Huron, which are higher than Lake Erie, and certainly Lake Ontario, which is on the receiving end of Niagara Falls. Gravity is obviously how all this water finds its way to the sea.

High recent rainfall—in June we had seven inches in Chicago with lower temperatures than normal—has kept the lake levels rising. Colder winters because of the polar vortexes have maintained ice cover, reducing evaporation. As a result, the lakes are now three feet higher than they were in 2012. Amid all this rise and fall, some facts should be noted: These lakes are thousands of years old. They are the result of glacial melt as the Ice Age receded, so most of the water is the result not of precipitation but of ancient glacial retreat. And our record keeping is less than a century old, so what we think we know about the long-term fluctuation in water levels, let alone what we can accurately predict about long-term impacts of climate change in the Midwest, remains far less than what we might ideally like to know. There are big gaps in our knowledge that can only partially be filled with other types of scientific analysis.

Nonetheless, based on such limited knowledge, the urge to build on shoreland materializing from nothing more than historical fluctuations sometimes motivates unwise development. Communities along the Great Lakes need to invest in wise lakefront planning that takes those fluctuations into account and does not create new hazards that are sure to arise in the face of lake levels that often rise again faster than we anticipated. Adequate buffers based on such fluctuations must be a part of the zoning and development regulations throughout such areas. It is best we approach what we know about Great Lakes water level fluctuations with a dose of humility and caution, lest nature make a fool of our aspirations.

There are resources for that purpose. Many of the state Sea Grant programs, based at state universities, can offer technical assistance. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose Coastal Zone Management Act responsibilities include the Great Lakes, has been developing resources for Great Lakes states. Using NOAA funding, the Association of State Floodplain Managers, with partners like the American Planning Association (APA), has developed, and is still expanding, a website containing its Great Lakes Coastal Resilience Planning Guide. It consists of case studies, a Great Lakes dashboard, and other tools. NOAA’s Digital Coast Partnership has been working with cities like Toledo, Ohio; Duluth, Minnesota; Green Bay, Wisconsin; and Milwaukee to address flooding and development problems along the Great Lakes in varying contexts.

I mention all this because, even amid this temporary abundance of water on the Great Lakes amid a withering drought on the West Coast, water, as always, remains a preoccupying public policy challenge everywhere around the world and across the United States. It is not nearly enough of a focus of public debate, however, and the complexities of the issue seem to evade most people’s attention, including those who ought to be thinking harder about it. Even those who do focus on the question are often siloed into narrow segments of water policy—wastewater, drinking water, flood protection and mitigation, drought planning, coastal zone management, and so forth. We need to approach water challenges more holistically.

APA’s board of directors approached the subject with that larger picture in mind in empowering a special task force to examine the issue. About two months ago, the task force released its report, which began by emphasizing that “water is a central and essential organizing element in a healthy urban environment.” It went on to call for viewing water resource management as “interdisciplinary, not multidisciplinary,” in other words, calling for collaboration among the professions involved. But it also called on the planning profession and university planning schools to provide more training, more education, and more resources centered around the subject of water and its importance to our society. And it calls for APA to “partner with national water service membership agencies” to “foster cross-industry participation and learning opportunities.” It is a far-reaching document that planning leadership in the U.S. is still absorbing, including me. But I commend it as an overdue conversation so that our future conversations about who uses water how, and for what purpose, can be considerably more sophisticated, as they clearly need to be.

We need to move away from pipedreams to serious conversations. Whether in California, where there is too little, or the Great Lakes, where there is currently plenty, we need to get it right because the stakes are high. Very high.

 

Jim Schwab

Did We Learn from Sandy?

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Two years ago, in June 2013, I participated in a day-long meeting in New York hosted by the Regional Plan Association (RPA) and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, helping explore the coastal policy implications of Hurricane Sandy. These two organizations were hardly the only ones pursuing such questions, but they were certainly among the most prominent. RPA has been a long-time presence in the New York Metro area, and the Lincoln Institute is a highly reputed research organization located at Harvard University. Both clearly had a stake in the region’s recovery from the Superstorm, and together they had access to some of the best planning minds familiar with disaster issues.

Last year, in part as a result of that and other research sessions and forums, the Lincoln Institute produced Lessons from Sandy: Federal Policies to Build Climate-Resilient Coastal Regions. Though many of their prescriptions will look familiar to those who have followed the trajectory of post-Sandy redevelopment, this report is both worth reading and very readable. It concentrates on issues of disaster relief, insurance and flood risk management, and urban infrastructure. Its recommendations are clear and strong, starting with a series of specific ideas for addressing future climate impacts during the recovery and rebuilding process, talking about how to make programs such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Public Assistance Program, which funds the rebuilding of public infrastructure, more flexible in this regard, improving the coordination of planning before and after disasters, and development of new financing and insurance mechanisms to support investments in mitigation and resilience. It also discusses realigning federal programs to reduce risk and restore the health of coastal resources, and better data sharing to aid decision making.

 

Jim Schwab

Resources for Planners to Address Hazards

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Sri Lankans dedicate new housing built in 2005, after the Indian Ocean tsunami, in a Buddhist ceremony.

Sri Lankans dedicate new housing built in 2005, after the Indian Ocean tsunami, in a Buddhist ceremony.

One benefit of increased attention to hazards and climate change within the planning profession is a growing array of valuable literature that can benefit practicing planners and widen the scope of thinking on the subject among academics. This review of books published within the past year or so is intended to highlight some of this new literature and offer some comparisons on the focus and practical value the authors provide.

Because urban planning is ultimately about people and the built environment, it may make sense to start this survey with two books that examine the context within which risk happens. Kathleen Tierney, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado in Boulder and director of the Natural Hazards Center there, sets out in The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2014) to reorient our thinking away from the idea that individual natural phenomena—earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, etc.—“cause” the death and destruction that we often associate with them. In fact, she says, the death and destruction, particularly in the modern world, is an artifact of the social decisions that produce and, equally important, distribute risk differentially among populations, often producing widely varying impacts. In the opening chapter, she states, “the organizing idea for this book is that disasters and their impacts are socially produced, and that the forces driving the production of disaster are embedded in the social order itself.”

By itself, the idea that disaster losses result from the collision of natural forces with the built environment should not surprise any planners with a modicum of intelligence. And the built environment is inevitably the result of both individual and community decisions. The devil of Tierney’s thesis lies in the details: paying attention not only to all the social, institutional, and political decisions that either enhance or mitigate risk but to how those decisions get made and for what reasons. It is clear that those impacts are anything but randomly distributed and that most are avoidable, yet the litany of losses marches on. Tierney notes that a great deal of professional attention in recent decades has focused on how people perceive risk, a legitimate area of inquiry, but not nearly as much has focused on the origins of risk and how it was socially constructed. There are reasons, after all, why a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti kills an estimated 300,000 (but who really knows?) yet only dozens at most in California, and why the 1,800 who died during Hurricane Katrina included overwhelmingly disproportionate numbers of the economically disadvantaged.

Most planners work in local or regional government, and they serve power structures that must make the decisions, even when they choose to do nothing, that affect these outcomes. In that sense, some of Tierney’s theories and conclusions may challenge our comfort zones because they imply (or state directly) a need to challenge power with regard to these issues. For precisely that reason, I recommend reading it. Most social progress results from stepping outside traditional comfort zones. For planners, it is also within our ethical and legal responsibilities to help protect public health, safety, and welfare.

Those who wish to examine more closely how differential risk affects more vulnerable subsections of community populations can follow up with a case in point provided by Michael R. Greenberg, professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers in New Jersey, where he had a front-row seat to observe Superstorm Sandy in 2012. As a baby boomer with aging parents, he says, the event inspired him to examine the issues such events pose for seniors. Protecting Seniors Against Environmental Disasters: From Hazards and Vulnerability to Prevention and Resilience (Routledge, 2014) closely dissects the vulnerabilities of the rising generation of seniors among baby boomers. It exposes the resulting collision of demographics with natural hazards and often inadequate public policy in considering the reduced resilience that may result. At the same time, he notes that many seniors in good mental and physical health can become assets in using their to help build the very resilience many communities will need in coming decades, if only their communities learn to focus these social resources to address and help solve such problems. My only regret after reading this thoughtful book is that the publisher chose to make it so expensive ($145 hardcover), but perhaps a library or electronic copy can make it more accessible.

Six authors, mostly at Texas A&M University (TAMU) have addressed the question of resilience head-on in Planning for Community Resilience: A Handbook for Reducing Vulnerability to Disasters (Island Press, 2014). Jamie Hicks Masterson, program director of Texas Target Communities (TAMU); Walter Gillis Peacock, professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and director of the Hazards Reduction & Recovery Center (TAMU); Shannon S. Van Zandt, associate professor in the department and director of the Center for Housing and Urban Development (TAMU); Himanshu Grover, assistant professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Regional Planning at the University of Buffalo; Lori Feild Schwarz, comprehensive planning manager for the City of Plano, Texas (and formerly in Galveston); and John T. Cooper, Jr., associate professor of practice in the same department at TAMU, have combined somehow to produce an almost seamless document that lays out a very practical approach to understanding and developing resilience within communities. The book is littered with tables, checklists, and exercises to walk planners and city officials through the necessary analysis to grasp the impacts of everyday planning decisions in connection with natural hazards. The book tends to rely heavily on the Texas and Gulf Coast experiences of the authors, but as they note with a wry sense of humor, “We like to say that if you can plan in Texas, you can plan anywhere.” For the practicing planner, this may well be the most useful of the five books reviewed here.

Two other books represent the rising level of interest among planners in addressing the impacts of climate change, a subject implicit, and sometimes explicitly expressed, in the three books noted above. One of these, Local Climate Action Planning (Island Press, 2012), by Michael R. Boswell, Adrienne I. Greve, and Tammy L. Seale, is actually three years old but still a very useful and well-informed primer for those planners and city officials undertaking to address climate change. The primary focus is actually not hazards but climate action plans, which focus on mitigating climate change by using public policy and planning to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For climate change skeptics, it is worth noting that many of the resulting strategies have local environmental and economic benefits that add to the allure of effective climate action plans. While much of the book addresses techniques like inventorying local greenhouse gas emissions and developing reduction strategies, nonetheless, the authors devote one chapter to climate adaptation and outline means of assessing community sectors for vulnerability to climate change impacts.

Finally, Adapting to Climate Change: Lessons from Natural Hazards Planning (Springer, 2014), assembled from a variety of contributions by editors Bruce C. Glavovic, of New Zealand’s Massey University, and Gavin P. Smith, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, brings together the subjects of climate and natural hazards in a way that points to future successes in addressing the increased vulnerabilities associated with climate change. Unlike the other books, it is less a single narrative than an anthology using examples of climate change adaptation from around the world. It is unquestionably the most cosmopolitan and far-reaching of the five books in its aspirations for global relevance, using case studies from South Africa, Peru, New Zealand, and the South Pacific, among other locations, in addition to the United States. The two editors first met while working in different capacities along the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina and have collaborated periodically ever since. Both have been anxious to explore and explain the critical roles of planning and governance in managing exposure to natural disasters, especially as “practitioners from diverse backgrounds  . . . are faced with the grand challenge of adapting to climate change. Planners who like to mine the experience of other cities and regions in case studies will find plenty to contemplate as they review the mixed international track record of community resilience in facing floods, coastal storms, and other weather-related phenomena influenced by a changing global climate with its wide-ranging variations in specific local settings. It may take a while to digest this substantial book, but it is probably well worth the effort.

 

Jim Schwab

Bounce Forward? But, of Course!

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In recent years, there has been growing interest in and activity around the concept of resilience. For many people long involved in trying to make the world’s communities safer from disasters, the interest has been heartwarming. The underlying idea is that a community should be better positioned to “bounce back” from a disaster, recovering more efficiently and quickly. A major natural disaster—tornado, hurricane, earthquake—need not be a death sentence or leave a community flat on its back for years. There are numerous ways in which we can do better. We can prepare better, mitigate better, plan better—but to what end?

Some resilience advocates are almost scared by the current interest. After all, look at what happened to the concept of sustainability, subjected by now to years of corporate whitewash and a relentless watering down of the essential message, as originally framed, that we have a moral obligation to future generations to leave them with the same opportunities to enjoy prosperity by reducing our ecological footprint, taking better care of the earth’s resources. Sustainability by its very nature ought to be challenging, yet too many things are too easily labeled sustainable, and the word loses its moral authority in the process.

Could the message of resilience be watered down in the same way?

For a long time, federal and state policies with regard to disaster assistance focused on supporting no more than the replacement of what existed before disaster struck. We’ll help you build back, but we won’t help you build a Cadillac. As federal policy, particularly within the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), increasingly emphasized hazard mitigation in order to minimize losses in future disasters, however, the idea behind such thinking became increasingly suspect. If you could make a community more resistant to future disasters, if you could reduce that community’s future reliance on outside assistance in managing recovery, why would you not want to make that investment? In the 1993 Midwest floods, in particular, the use of federal Hazard Mitigation Grant Program money to buy out flood-prone properties and create public open space in floodplains at least meant removing some development from harm’s way. That opened the door to even more forward thinking. Some relocated communities, like Valmeyer, Illinois, went much farther and adopted green building codes. The “green rebuild” of Greensburg, Kansas, after its 2007 tornado built on this idea.

DSCF1844Indeed, is there really anything wrong with leaving a community better off than it was before? By the time the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force issued its report in 2013, this bridge appears to have been crossed. The task force answer was clearly that we want very much to rebuild communities that would be more resilient in the face of future disasters. Ideally, that would not mean that such communities would merely regain their pre-disaster status quo more quickly, although that seems to have been the goal for more than a few communities after Sandy. The bigger vision just never materialized. At the same time, however, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has been seeking ways, most recently through the National Disaster Resilience Competition, to encourage states and communities to think about improvements that, in particular, instill greater resilience among their most vulnerable populations.

The question won’t go away, and fortunately, there are plenty of people, particularly within the growing community of climate change adaptation professionals, who remain engaged. This is a very good thing because, in the face of phenomena like climate change and sea level rise, hazard mitigation faces the prospect of running hard merely to stay in place, a la Alice in Wonderland. Elevate homes, retreat from the seashore, and you find in another generation that you have gained little or nothing because average temperatures are rising and the sea is following you to higher ground. This is precisely why the latest guidance from FEMA on hazard mitigation assistance insists that states and communities must begin to account for climate change in the hazard mitigation plans that qualify them for federal grants. There is little sense in spending federal money to mitigate the same problem repeatedly when you can do it once with more foresight.

At the risk of oversimplifying the underlying questions, which can and do fill volumes of scholarly and professional analysis these days, I lay this out as the background for introducing a remarkable new document unleashed into this debate by The Kresge Foundation. Bounce Forward, a strategy paper from Island Press and the foundation, which funded the project, raises the question of what constitutes “urban resilience in the era of climate change.” At the outset, it confronts the fear I cited at the beginning of this blog post—that of losing the essential poignancy of the message of resilience. It states:

But the transformative potential of resilience is far from assured. There are several potential pitfalls. Notably, if resilience is conceived simply as “bouncing back” from disaster, it could prove harmful, by reinforcing systems that compound the risks our cities face. More insidiously, the concept of resilience could be co-opted by opponents of meaningful reform. And if efforts to build resilience do not also mitigate climate change, they will be of limited use.

I sense an echo here. For some years, at the American Planning Association and some allied organizations, we have talked of “building back better” as the real goal of disaster recovery. (See Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation.)* But resilience is about much more than effective recovery from disasters. It is also about positioning a community’s human and institutional resources to respond to all manner of setbacks, whether stemming from chronic decline and social pressures, or from the impact of nature on the built environment, to deal more creatively with those problems so as to evolve a society that can help its least advantaged sectors in responding to those threats and to become more prosperous and confident. A commitment to social justice must be inherent in the formula. A society that imposes unfair environmental burdens upon, and denies opportunities to, its most economically challenged elements cannot be resilient in any meaningful way. Such a society is merely perpetuating its vulnerabilities. A community is only as strong as its weakest link. In an “era of rapid change,” the Kresge report says, in effect, that weakest link is getting weaker, inequalities are growing and will be magnified by the impacts of climate change, and the concept of resilience means nothing or worse if it does not address these issues.

The aim of Bounce Forward is to create a framework for doing so. Stronger social cohesion and more inclusive community decision making are among the ingredients essential to this transformation. What’s more, as such reports go, this one is a very good read.

Jim Schwab

*I wish to note that, at the invitation of The Kresge Foundation, I have participated over the past year as a member of its Project Advisory Committee for a study of community resilience being prepared by Stratus Consultants, which is still being completed. I also represented APA at a Kresge Foundation symposium on resilience at the Garrison Institute, held last June in Garrison, NY. Because of our common agendas, APA has had an active interest in supporting the Kresge initiatives on this subject.

Update to “Don’t Say Those Words”

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In response to my good friend, Allison Hardin, planner and floodplain manager in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, posting on Facebook the article referenced in my last post from the Post & Courier covering my and Matt Hauer’s presentations last week at the Coastal GeoTools conference, another long-time friend, James Quigley, who teaches at Stonybrook University on Long Island, has brought to our attention another article about Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s unofficial policy that state employees in various agencies not use the words “climate change.” This one is from the Miami Herald, further elaborating on a situation first brought to light by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. Check it out.

Jim Schwab

Report from Coastal GeoTools 2015

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Somewhat dark, this is what happens when you don't remember to charge a camera with a flash. :)

Somewhat dark, this is what happens when you don’t remember to charge a camera with a flash. 🙂

Since Sunday evening, I have been in North Charleston, South Carolina, attending the 2015 Coastal GeoTools conference, hosted by the Association of State Floodplain Managers with support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. I intend to post more material from this conference as the opportunity arises, but as is often the case, especially where one is both a participant and presenter, time is often tight and inadequate to write the sorts of thoughtful analyses and comments I prefer to make the hallmark of this blog. But look for more in coming days.

In the meantime, however, at least with regard to a session on coastal inundation at which I presented Tuesday morning, the local press (Post & Courier) made my job easier because I can provide the following link to coverage of our panel: http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20150331/PC16/150339871/1177/researcher-millions-could-be-displaced-by-rising-oceans-by-2100

I will say for now that this is a truly useful and informative conference for the attendees, who explore uses of geospatial technology to help the nation and coastal communities solve vexing problems of coastal hazards, sea level rise, and coastal development. This is a thriving area of discussion, and there is a good deal of fertile work evident among the presentations so far.

Jim Schwab