What does it mean to be resilient? How do we avoid creating yet another buzzword with such a loose definition it encompasses everything and nothing at the same time?
Whether on a personal, economic, climate, infrastructure, or any other number of scales, resilience is generally understood to mean the ability or capacity to recover quickly from adversity. In other words, resiliency doesn’t exist without disaster.
As planners, one of our main goals is to help communities avoid potential challenges by adequately planning for future scenarios. The tagline of my college urban planning program was actually “save the world, be a planner!” Needless to say, many of us have high aspirations entering this field. So, does the rise of resiliency planning mean we’ve given up? Maybe. But it also means we’re being practical in understanding we can’t completely prevent every hardship that may come, no matter the mitigation efforts. The COVID-19 pandemic upending our everyday lives, a rise in social unrest, and the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declaring a “code red for humanity” in August of 2021, has only pushed us further towards this realization.
What we can do though, is increase our ability to absorb and bounce back from an array of obstacles and setbacks based on what we know.
Climate Change in the Midwest and the Role of Resiliency
The impacts of the Climate Crisis vary based on regions. Changes in precipitation coupled with extreme temperatures are the primary effects in the Midwest of the United States. These effects will:
- Reduce agricultural productivity harming the regional economy and food national food system
- Increase migration and population of invasive species and pests increasing tree and forest mortality and vector-born illnesses.
- Worsen health conditions due to increased frequency and intensity of poor air quality days, extreme high temperature events, and heavy rainfalls, extending pollen/allergy seasons.
- Impact stormwater, transportation, and other critical infrastructure from elevated flood risks, freeze and thaw patterns (hello potholes!), and heat-buckling temperatures.
At the time of writing this St. Louis, Missouri and eastern Kentucky are in the midst of recovery from extreme flooding facing tens of millions of dollars in damages and rising death tolls. Each event characterized by the rarity in the amount of rainfall and timeframe it occurred with the caveat we are likely to continue to see more of the same in the seasons to come. Improved infrastructure in our streets, stormwater, and landscaping is crucial to lessening the impacts of such events as well as average events compounded by the extreme events saturating the ground and overwhelming our stormwater systems.
Components of Building Resilience
There are many tools and frameworks for measuring resilience. Scorecards used may focus buildings and infrastructure, or include the community’s economic, social, institutional, ecosystem, and infrastructure capacities. An article by Atreya & Kunreuther (2018) lays out a holistic framework to systematically inventory a community’s strengths, called the 6C-4R framework:
6 Capitals to Evaluate:
- Financial – financial resources a community has that can support recovery from hazards (ex: insurance, funds, property values, investments, household income)
- Human – skills knowledge, health and access to labor that enable people to cope with, prepare for and recover from the impacts of hazards (ex: employment records, education attainment)
- Natural – natural resources available to absorb hazard impacts (ex: wetlands, forests/trees, parks, waterbodies)
- Physical – ability of infrastructure and the built environment withstand shocks (ex: electricity, water, transportation, commercial and residential buildings, building codes, shelters)
- Political – how decisions are made in the community and how outside resources are obtained and used to build resiliency (ex: influencing power of elected officials, community leaders and groups)
- Social – how social networks increase trust and connections among people in the community and ability to work together (ex: voter participation, number and role of non-profits, voluntary associations, and religious organizations)
4 Resilience Properties:
- Robustness – The ability to withstand stress without suffering damaging loss or functionality.
- Resourcefulness – The capacity to identify problems, establish priorities, and mobilize resources when existing conditions threaten to disrupt the system.
- Rapidity – The capacity to meet priorities and achieve goals quickly to contain losses, recover functionality and avoid future disruption.
- Redundancy – The amount of backup resources and systems to support when others fail (physical, network, facilities etc).
Taken together, communities strong in each category will have a better ability to respond and recover from adverse events.
The Role of Planning in Resiliency
Successful resilience planning requires an interdisciplinary approach. Planners must work with allied professions (e.g., architects, landscape architects, and engineers) to advance strategies both structural (i.e., physical projects) and nonstructural (i.e., policies and regulations). APA’s PAS Report 601 emphasizes how planners in all sectors will not only need to be a part of the solution but lead it. The authors point out that increasing community resilience will require comprehensive, visionary, and systems-oriented responses based on robust and informed community engagement and facilitation, consensus building, and prioritization. That sounds like a planner to me!
Integration is Critical
The more complementary and connected community plans are, the more effective they can be. An APA PAS Memo from January 2021 by Joseph DeAngelis, AICP et al highlights the contradiction of having a subarea plan encouraging development in an area a local hazard mitigation plan identifies as a flood zone. The authors break down the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard (PIRS) and how to create and use it to evaluate overall plan integration within a community.
Resilience doesn’t exist without disaster. It also cannot succeed without adaptation and mitigation. The more effective mitigation efforts are the less communities will have to adapt to changes and the less severe the shocks are to absorb and bounce back from.
Resilience planning may be a more approachable way to talk about how we’re going to manage the “single biggest health threat facing humanity” (declared by the World Health Organization in October 2021) instead of the arguably over-used buzzword “sustainability” that many communities are wary of. But only if we clearly define, act, and embrace it as a nonpartisan fact of existence. The more concrete, measurable, and tangible resilience planning is, the more implementable it is, rising beyond another buzzword.
Article Source:
Atreya A, Kunreuther H. Assessing community resilience: mapping the community rating system (CRS) against the 6C-4R frameworks. Environmental hazards. 2020;19(1):30-49. doi:10.1080/17477891.2018.1549970