From HuffPost: EPA’s Superfund Program, A Trump Priority, Is A Shambles. It turns out it’s hard to clean up toxic waste without money.

From Direct Relief: 10 Disasters That Changed the World. Over the past decade, these crises have stretched the world’s ideas about what a disaster can do and how best to respond.

From the NYTimes: As record fires rage, the country’s leaders seem intent on sending it to its doom.  Two excerpts:

And yet, incredibly, the response of Australia’s leaders to this unprecedented national crisis has been not to defend their country but to defend the coal industry, a big donor to both major parties — as if they were willing the country to its doom. While the fires were exploding in mid-December, the leader of the opposition Labor Party went on a tour of coal mines expressing his unequivocal support for coal exports. The prime minister, the conservative Scott Morrison, went on vacation to Hawaii.

In 1996 successive conservative Australian governments have successfully fought to subvert international agreements on climate change in defense of the country’s fossil fuel industries. Today, Australia is the world’s largest exporter of both coal and gas. It recently was ranked 57th out of 57 countries on climate-change action.

From Scientific American: Fires and Flood Cap Off a Decade of U.S. Disasters. While California had some success at minimizing wildfires in 2019, much work remains to mitigate flooding

NOTE: the Diva received this news release from NHMA but cannot find any more details. She would like to talk to a staffer connected with the project and would appreciate contact information. This site has 9 years worth of info stored and should be of use to the project team. _________________________________________________________________
American Planning Association: Developing a Disaster Recovery Guide with Planners in Mind, By Alexandra Gomez, American Planning Association

In an effort to better support planners facing post-disaster recovery, the American Planning Association (APA) and the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University partnered to undertake a two-year research project, funded through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Cooperating Technical Partners program, resulting in a “Disaster Recovery Guide for Planning Practitioners” that will be tested and evaluated through APA’s Community Planning Assistance Team (CPAT) volunteer-based local technical assistance program.

Phase One of the project involved designing and executing a mixed-methods approach to collect evidence of what planners want and need from an “at-your-fingertips” recovery guide. The two primary research questions asked how planners perceive the disaster recovery process and the role of planners in it, and what they need to know about disaster recovery to better support their communities.
The result of the first phase of the project is two reports which detail the research findings.

The Quantitative Survey Report contains the results of an online survey of a random sample of 1,000 APA members, with a response rate of just under 200 participants.
The Qualitative Interview Report summarizes the responses of 33 interview subjects, which included 11 planners and 22 allied professionals. ***

Key findings from the Quantitative Survey Report found that few participants had experience making plans for post-disaster recovery and do not regularly utilize existing recovery resources. Although the research suggests that there is currently a lack of education and training for disaster recovery planning, participants were receptive to future educational resources, specifically workshops, conferences, symposia, and other interactive training and tools. The most pressing topics are disaster-specific funding information and guidelines for using disaster-and-recovery specific data, including a considerable need for technical support beyond Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

In the Qualitative Interview Report, themes similar to the survey findings emerged with more specific examples that portray the recovery context today’s planners are dealing with. Across the board, coordination and collaboration at various points in the recovery process is lacking. Notably, planners do not often perceive themselves —and are not perceived by other recovery professionals —as being central to the disaster recovery process, and this inevitably leads to a last-minute scramble for leadership. Fostering pre-disaster relationships and opening lines of commun-ications between planners and other professionals working in disaster recovery at the local, regional, and national levels could alleviate these unneeded delays. Finally, in the post-disaster environment, planners are often tasked with efficiently coordinating an influx of volunteers and aid —a task that might be unusual to planners who often only coordinate small departments or public meetings. This is merely another example of how planners need support in translating their existing skills to larger-scale, time-compressed disaster recovery situations.

Learning about disaster recovery can be overwhelming and isolating. It goes without saying that education should come in various forms to accommodate all types of communities, situations, and planning styles, but the research indicates that the most effective method is through coaching and mentorship. Planners seem to learn best from peers who have experienced disaster recovery before and could guide them through the process or warn them of upcoming challenges. Planners who do not have the opportunity to learn from peers must navigate policy options for recovery on their own, improvise based on what they know, and quickly review the daunting and ever-growing list of best practices. In the end, they are often swamped with general recovery information, but lack access to specific information for community-based processes that incorporate planning tools.

Navigating funding, data analysis, and public participation is a ubiquitous struggle for planners, and it is only intensified by approaching deadlines, inaccessible data, and emotionally exhausted residents in a post-disaster environment. Recovery funding processes are particularly difficult to manage due to lack of clear guidelines and the conditionalities of various funding streams. Planners find it difficult to translate indicators and goals for equity and inclusivity into tangible outcomes, especially when public participation processes in disaster recovery planning are still primarily expert-led rather than community-centered.

Based on the findings of both reports, the research indicates that the forthcoming disaster recovery guide should focus on:

• Setting the standard that planners have a leadership role in recovery

• Emphasizing how recovery and resilience are compatible with daily planning practices

• Developing formal peer-to-peer learning opportunities and planner-specific training for disaster recovery

• Building stronger social networks of recovery and disaster professionals

• Creating accountability measures for the inclusion of equity, health, and housing components in pre-disaster recovery plans

• Streamlining the process of gathering sources of funding, data, and community input in post-disaster recovery environments

Phase Two of this multi-year project is now underway and will result in a guide that takes into consideration the research findings. The guide will be tested and evaluated through a Community Planning Assistance Team (CPAT), which provides specialized, place-based technical assistance to communities that lack the resources to address planning challenges.  In the next few months, APA will be locating a community-in-need to collaborate with. Travel for CPAT volunteers will be funded with a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Disaster Guide for Planning Practitioners will be released in fall of 2020.

 

Please see my other website www.disastersandfaith.com for information about security for faith-based organizations. December has been a terrible month for criminal acts against religious groups.