New Approaches to Resilience: Policy and Practice

ABSTRACT

The concept of resilience has become part of the lexicon for disaster researchers in universities and government agencies. The concept has evolved significantly over the past 10-20 years. In 2010-11, the engineering community was coming to grips with the two paradigms of resilience: 1) an engineering approach that focused on predictability and stability in a steady state; and 2) an ecological definition that focused on persistence and the ability to reorganize while undergoing change. In the past 5 years, the concept of resilience is again being redefined, in part because of experience with the Covid pandemic, and climate change, and in part because recent disasters have overwhelmed humanitarian aid and recovery programs. There simply have not been sufficient resources to meet disaster recovery needs in a timely fashion even with a resilience rebuilding approach.

In this talk I will focus on what we have learned from recent disasters, from the pandemic, and from evolving polices for addressing climate change as well as disasters. It is important to discuss what goes wrong and what works with case studies from multiple disaster recovery efforts, but equally important to evaluate policies and programs that are designed to improve resilience as an ex-ante recovery measure. I will discuss two examples of lifeline policies and programs with a community resilience focus, and one on investment in the creation of housing programs to meet baseline needs and reduce housing losses in future disasters. There are similar opportunities for resilience through investment in many infrastructure sectors, as well as schools, health care, and other services. A new approach to resilience requires policies and programs that include linking needs in multiple sectors and improving public and private sector capacity in the full range of critical services before disaster strikes.

BIO

Mary Comerio is an internationally recognized expert on disaster resilience and recovery. She has been on the faculty in the Department of Architecture at U.C. Berkeley for 45 years and has served as Chair. She worked as an architect and conducted research on seismic rehabilitation, post-disaster recovery and reconstruction, loss modeling and resilience-based design. She led the FEMA sponsored Disaster Resistant University Program; and the Building Systems Research at PEER with Helmut Krawinkler. Comerio also served at co-PI on one of NSF’s Grand Challenge projects focused on the mitigation of collapse risk in nonductile concrete buildings.

Comerio is the author of Disaster Hits Home: New Policy for Urban Housing Recovery (UC Press 1998) and hundreds of other books, research reports, and scientific papers. She has received numerous awards, including the Green Star Award from the UN for post-disaster recovery work in 2011; the U. C. Berkeley Chancellor’s Award for Public Service for Research in the Public Interest; and the EERI Distinguished Lecturer Award in 2013. She was made an Honorary Member of SEAONC in 2018, and EERI in 2019. She was awarded the Housner Medal in 2022 for lasting contributions to earthquake safety. She is a past- president of EERI and served on the Governing Board of the QuakeCoRE Center for Earthquake Resilience in New Zealand.