Last year I joined University of Washington’s Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering. A new research center was started a little before that called Center for Collaborative Systems for Security, Safety and Regional Resilience. The gist of the mission of CoSSaR is that community resilience requires putting people and communities first in helping them …
I was recently in Christchurch as part of a National Science Foundation project, as well as to speak at the People in Disasters Conference and attend the 5th anniversary memorial service of the February 22nd, 2011 earthquake. I rented a car for the weekend to drive and walk around the residential red zone at my …
This is a question that guided my students and I in developing a fictional news site www.resilientkingcounty.org with fake stories about a 10 year anniversary of a future Seattle Fault earthquake. Students used information generated during workshops I designed and facilitated with King County Office of Emergency Management as part of their Resilient King County initiative. Participants of …
Roger Pielke wrote an article at FiveThirtyEight about whether the rising costs of disasters are linked to climate change. The article got a lot of comments and generated some critical press As a result, Roger posted a followup to quell the critics. What’s all the hubbub? Roger’s conclusion is that rising disaster costs are not the result of climate change. Or at …
I just saw this article in Huffington Post about how the role of fat in nutrition has been misunderstood (at least by the public and policy makers) for the past couple decades. Fat does not make you fat and good fat is a critical part of energy production in the body. In fact, fat is the most efficient …
I just returned from a trip to Canterbury, New Zealand as part of a project between the World Bank and EERI, which I mentioned here. The objective of the project is to research how and whether recovery after the February 2011 earthquake reflects the concept of “build back better.” In interviewing stakeholders, we were focused on the three most impacted sectors: …
In September, I’m heading to Canterbury, New Zealand as part of a joint project between the World Bank and EERI. The objective of the project is to research how and whether recovery after the February 2011 earthquake reflects the concept of “build back better.” Apparently, the World Bank is keen on developing guidelines that are relevant across different types of disasters …
At the Natural Hazards Workshop this year, Daniel Aldrich gave a keynote talk about his findings from researching correlations between various variables and community recovery from disasters. In particular, he focused on his awesome empirical study of Kobe’s recovery from the 1995 earthquake. (While its not relevant to this post, he found that proxies of social capital had the greatest …
In most of the literature, the goal of community resilience is maintaining and recovering the functioning of some community. This is undoubtably an important goal, but it is not an imaginative or normative one. The goal of resilience should go beyond functioning and ultimately be the well-being of different communities and their members. Norris et al. (2008) argues that well-being sets …