Jaimie Hicks Masterson

Planning for Community Resilience

This timely handbook brings together the fields of planning, disaster response, and hazards management to provide a field-tested process on how to make communities disaster-resilient. How can we plan and design stronger communities? Communities struck by natural disasters struggle to recover long after the first responders have left. Globally, the average annual number of natural disasters has more than doubled since 1980. These catastrophes are increasing in number as well as in magnitude, causing greater damage as we experience rising sea levels and other effects of climate change. Communities can reduce their vulnerability to disaster by becoming more resilient, to not only bounce back more readily from disasters but to grow stronger, more socially cohesive, and more environmentally responsible. To be truly resilient, disaster preparation and recovery must consider all populations in the community. By bringing together natural hazards planning and community planning to consider vulnerabilities, more resilient and equitable communities are achievable. In Planning for Community Resilience the authors describe an inclusive process for creating disaster-resilient communities. This handbook guides any community through the process of determining their level of hazard exposure, physical vulnerability, and social vulnerability with the goal of determining the best planning strategy. This will be an invaluable tool for professionals working to protect communities from disturbance.

The development of a participatory assessment technique for infrastructure: Neighborhood-level monitoring towards sustainable infrastructure systems

Climate change and increasing natural disasters coupled with years of deferred maintenance have added pressure to infrastructure in urban areas. Thus, monitoring for failure of these systems is crucial to prevent future impacts to life and property. Participatory assessment technique for infrastructure provides a community-based approach to assess the capacity and physical condition of infrastructure. Furthermore, a participatory assessment technique for infrastructure can encourage grassroots activism that engages residents, researchers, and planners in the identification of sustainable development concerns and solutions. As climate change impacts disproportionately affect historically disenfranchised communities, assessment data can further inform planning, aiming to balance the distribution of public resources towards sustainability and justice. This paper explains the development of the participatory assessment technique for infrastructure that can provide empirical data about the condition of infrastructure at the neighborhood-level, using stormwater systems in a vulnerable neighborhood in Houston, Texas as a case study. This paper argues for the opportunity of participatory methods to address needs in infrastructure assessment and describes the ongoing project testing the best use of these methods.

Plan integration for resilience scorecard: evaluating networks of plans in six US coastal cities

Planning for hazard mitigation is frequently detached from other planning activities that influence development patterns in hazardous areas. Consistent integration of mitigation reduces hazard vulnerability for people and the built environment. We apply a plan integration for resilience scorecard in six US coastal cities to evaluate the integration of local networks of plans and the degree to which they target areas most vulnerable to flooding hazards. We find that plan integration scores vary widely across the six cities, and that some plans actually increase vulnerability in hazard zones. Policies also frequently support mitigation in areas with low vulnerability, rather than in areas with high vulnerability. The plan integration for resilience scorecard can generate information to improve hazard planning by allowing planners to identify conflicts between plans, assess whether plans target areas that are most vulnerable, and better inform decision makers about opportunities to mainstream mitigation into multiple sectors of planning.

Assessing Social Vulnerability

A critical piece, and often the most neglected piece, of resilience to disaster is the identification and mapping of a community’s social vulnerabilities. When disaster strikes, its impact is not just a function of its magnitude and where it strikes. Development patterns characterized by sprawl, concentrated poverty, and segregation shape urban environments in ways that isolate vulnerable populations so that poor and rich, white and black, owners and renters, primary residents and vacationers, are separated from one another in clusters and pockets across the community. In many communities, if not most, the social geography interacts with the physical geography to expose vulnerable populations to greater risk. Vulnerable populations are less likely to have access to both information and resources that would allow them to anticipate and respond to a real or perceived threat, yet they are more often than not the groups who most need to attend to warnings to evacuate or seek shelter.

Organizing and Connecting through the Disaster Phases

With the previous chapter’s definitions of resilience and community capital assets in hand, we now turn to a broad conceptualization of the disaster management phases. Actions taken to build resilience in a community can occur at any of the four phases of disaster management: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.

What Is Resilience

To begin tackling the problem of increased vulnerability to natural disasters, we must understand what we are trying to achieve. In recent years, the term resilience has gained popularity, but it is used in widely varying ways. All communities should strive for resilience, but what does it mean? Resilience has different definitions arising from a range of disciplines that use the concept, including natural hazard management, ecology, psychology, sociology, geography, psychiatry, and public health. These different perspectives mean that resilience is a widely used term that can take on different meanings in different contexts. The following is an in-depth look at the ecological and social aspects of resilience as defined in various fields of research.

An Assessment of Hazard Mitigation Plans

This chapter introduces and discusses hazard mitigation planning and plans as a critical step in mobilizing a community to increase disaster resiliency. Hazard mitigation plans are in many respects a recent policy tool. Introduced by the federal government, hazard mitigation plans are an approach to help communities better understand their disaster vulnerability, identify strategies and actions the community can use to help lessen their vulnerabilities, and develop priorities for funding these mitigation actions and projects. The Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 began the process of encouraging local jurisdictions to develop local hazard mitigation plans if the local jurisdiction wanted to gain federal funding to help implement mitigation projects and actions. By mid-2007 approximately 14,000 of these plans had been approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) throughout the United States. As of 2011, there were more than 26,000 approved plans.

Assessing Physical Vulnerability

The fact basis for both hazard mitigation and comprehensive planning has long been based on hazard exposure and physical or structural vulnerability. As discussed in chapter 4, hazard exposure is a function of the nature of the hazard agent and its potential to affect the geography of urban areas captured in risk maps. Physical or structural vulnerability, on the other hand, is a function of the location of the population and the built environment relative to the hazard. In other words, hazards become disasters when they interact with populated areas. When they strike communities, hazards interact with physical systems that include elements of the built and natural environment that are often taken for granted (figure 5.1). How often do we think about the pipes that carry our water or electricity? Do we ever consider the investment and value of wastewater or sewage facilities and the strength and integrity of our schools or fire stations? Thus, physical vulnerability is the susceptibility to damage and loss based on the interaction between exposure and physical characteristics. These include the following:

Planner’s Toolbox

Our findings with respect to hazard mitigation planning were somewhat discouraging but not completely unexpected given the literature. The basic patterns we saw in Texas were similar to those found in the variety of states examined by Lyles, Berke, and Smith. Hazard mitigation plans are complying with Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) guidelines but are often quite weak when it comes to actually assessing community vulnerabilities and risks, and the proposed policies and actions tend to be limited in scope, focusing on structural mitigation solutions and more traditional emergency management approaches. These findings led us to consider whether the narrow scope of mitigation actions, particularly the nonstructural policies and strategies, proffered by these plans was perhaps a function of an already narrow repertoire of planning polices and strategies actually being used by jurisdictions in the first place.

The New Era of Catastrophes

In recent years, we have seen the terrifying impacts of natural disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, the Wenchuan and Kobe earthquakes, the Fukushima tsunami and nuclear disaster, and, most recently, 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. Globally, the average annual number of natural disasters reported has more than doubled since 1980., These catastrophes are increasing in the number of meteorological events (tropical storms, severe weather, winter storms, hail, tornadoes, and local storms), hydrological events (flash floods, river floods, storm surge, and landslides), and climatological events (heatwaves, freezes, wildfires, and drought). Although geophysical events, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, have remained more stable, there has been catastrophic damage to structures and lives, most notably seen in the Kobe earthquake, Wenchuan earthquake, and, more recently, earthquakes in Haiti in 2010 and Japan in 2011. We are experiencing not only an increased number of events but also an increase in their magnitude or severity. The number of “devastating” catastrophes (those with more than 500 fatalities or more than US