Designing Resilience for Communities at Risk

1. Designing Resilience for Communities at Risk Louise K. Comfort, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, comfort@gspia.pitt.edu

2. Risk and resilience • Changing status of communities: • Greater exposure to hazards • Aging infrastructure • Changing demographics • Increasing demand for services, but declining resources • Deepening vulnerability to extreme events

3. Policy dilemma • Reduce risk vs. increase resilience • Risk: exposure to harmful events outside one’s control • Resilience: capacity to absorb damaging event, but maintain basic operations to support the community • Tension between allocating scarce resources to reduce vulnerability to risk…. • ….ordeveloping capacity to manage risk more efficiently

4. Key Factors that underlie risk • Insufficient monitoring of changing environment • Heterogeneity in populations exposed to risk • Inability to recognize threats indifferent arenas of action • Asymmetry in information processes among different constituent groups • Inability to mobilize collective action to counter threat

5. Key Factors that underlie resilience • Capacity to hold and exchange information • Flexibility to adapt to changing situation • Commitment to a shared goal for the community • Systematic assessment of changing state of community • Capacity to update information about risk and to act on timely, valid information

6. Building Resilience • Three basic tasks: • Build a knowledge base of region and its exposure to risk • Identify the parameters in the system that can and will vary under threat, e.g.: • Number of personnel engaged in operations • Degree of commonality among actors in terms of training, experience, available resources • Number of demands placed on the system • Identify the threshold for intervention in system to inject new resources, material, information to enable system to adapt

7. Haiti following the 12 January 2010 Earthquake • Initial conditions before the earthquake: • Extreme vulnerability in built environment: buildings, roads, water, sanitation, communications, power systems • Extreme vulnerability in social environment: 80% unemployment; 55-60% illiteracy; mean life expectancy: 43 years. • Impact of a sudden, extreme event is exacerbated by vulnerability • Conditions limit capacity of community for adaptation with internal resources • Severity of event requires external assistance

8. Impact of event, without resilience • Severe losses: at least 230,000 lives lost • 1.5 million people homeless, • 80% of the buildings in Port au Prince destroyed • Eleven out of twelve governmental ministries collapsed, as well as the Presidential palace Presidential Palace Ministry of Public Works

9. Catastrophic damage • 80% of the schools’ infrastructure was destroyed or damaged; • Three of the four universities were severely damaged, • General Hospital, the primary medical institution in the city collapsed

10. Figure 1. Network Diagram of Interacting Organizations in the Haiti Earthquake Response System, January 12 – February 3, 2010

11. Table 2 Small World Network within Haiti Response System, January 12- February 3, 2010

12. Strategies for recovery, reconstruction • Reconstruction requires a “systems approach” • System is made up of interacting, interdependent components that adapt to changing environments • Design a “knowledge commons” to support decision-making in regions exposed to risk.  (Hess & Ostrom, 2007) • “knowledge commons” includes a shared knowledge base, but also the technical infrastructure and organizational processes to support information search, exchange, updates, storage, transmission • Users of the knowledge commons contribute to updating and revising profiles of “status of the community” in dynamic environments. 

13. Strategies for reconstruction • Characteristics of a knowledge commons: • Interdisciplinary: • technical, organizational, cultural content • Interjurisdictional: • International, national, state/provincial, local • Intersectoral: • Public, private, nonprofit organizations as participating users • Scalable in function: • System is anchored at local level where first action occurs, • but scales rapidly to wider arenas as dynamics of interaction shift among participants .

14. Conclusions • Lack of local knowledge exacerbates disaster risk • Design and development of a knowledge commons reduces disaster risk • Information technology, carefully designed and implemented, facilitates information search, exchange, and organizational learning. • Powerful resource in process available to a community exposed to long term risk is the capacity of its people to learn