From the NY Times: Not Your Mother’s Jersey Shore. Five years after Hurricane Sandy destroyed communities along the shore, some towns have used the rebuilding process as a time to reinvent themselves.

From the PBS News Hour, this really important article: What federal emergency fund cuts could mean for states dealing with disasters.

The article contains some interesting charts with key data on the topic.

This is special and right on target for readers of this blog. The Diva has a review copy, and a review will be posted in a couple of weeks. A 76-page Policy Focus Report is available as a free download from this site.

The full book is: After Great Disasters: An In-Depth Analysis of How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery, Paperback $30.00, 376 pages; ISBN 978-1-55844-331-0), by Laurie A. Johnson and Robert Olshansky.  Here is some of the promotional material from the publisher:

In the face of earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and the extreme weather impacts of climate change, communities need to plan ahead for their disaster recovery to ensure that they rebound and emerge stronger than before, according to a groundbreaking new book of in-depth case studies from six countries across three continents.

This book synthesizes the authors’ 25 years of collaborative experience as recovery planners onsite of major disasters ranging from the 1995 earthquake in Kobe to Hurricane Sandy in 2012. They recommend best practices for urban officials and policy makers based on firsthand research on the roles of various levels of government in successful disaster recovery and rebuilding in the United States, Japan, China, New Zealand, Indonesia, India, and several other countries around the world. The authors collected hundreds of documents and interviewed government officials, academic researchers, representatives of international aid organizations, community leaders, and disaster survivors, with the aim of finding common lessons in these disparate environments and facilitating the recovery of communities struck by future disasters.

The book provides more tools for implementation following the 2016 publication of the Policy Focus Report After Great Disasters: How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery, also by Johnson and Olshansky, showing how metropolitan regions can rebuild for greater resilience during the reconstruction process after earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, or terrorists attacks. “The level of detail in the book is invaluable for disaster recovery workers on the ground, compared to the concise recommendations in the earlier report, which is geared to readers at the executive level,” says Olshansky, head of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champlain. Johnson is an urban planning researcher and consultant, and chairs the U.S. National Advisory Committee for Earthquake Hazards Reduction.

As Johnson notes, “Disasters can change the fortunes of a city or region forever.” Chicago and San Francisco became more successful cities after being ravaged by fire and earthquake, respectively, and Tokyo successfully survived devastating fires caused by earthquake and war. But the city center of Managua, Nicaragua, never recovered from a 1972 earthquake, and Galveston, Texas, lost its status as a booming metropolis after its destruction by a great hurricane in 1900.

The management of recovery matters because disasters extend over time. They disrupt lives and businesses as people await assistance, infrastructure repair, and the return of their neighbors. Physical recovery from disasters takes many years, and the psychological scars can last for decades. Many people survive the initial disaster but then suffer from the recovery as the economy stagnates, social networks weaken, and healthcare and support services decline. The process of recovery is a major aspect of a disaster, and its management can affect both the intensity and the duration of citizens’ disaster experiences. Post-disaster reconstruction offers a variety of opportunities to fix long-standing problems by improving construction and design standards and quality, renewing infrastructure, creating new land use arrangements, avoiding hazardous locations, reinventing economies, improving governance, and raising community awareness and preparedness.

In the past 40 years, a number of serious international disasters have required large-scale, sustained intervention by multiple levels of government and nongovernmental organizations, and their activities and actions have increased knowledge of long-term post-disaster reconstruction. We now have enough examples to develop effective models for the process of rebuilding human settlements after disasters.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Evolving Approaches to Managing Recovery from Large-Scale Disasters

2. China: Top-Down, Fast-Paced Reconstruction

3. New Zealand: Centralizing Governance and Transforming Cityscapes

4. Japan: National Land Use Regulations Drive Recovery

5. India: State-Managed Recovery with NGO Involvement

6. Indonesia: Centrally Managed, Community-Driven Approaches to Reconstruction

7. United States: An Evolving Recovery Policy Centralized at Federal and State Levels

8. Conclusions and Recommendations

 

 

Highest Cost disasters in 2016.

Red Cross: Social Ills Make Disasters Worse in Latin America, Caribbean

High levels of violence and inequality complicate the challenge of managing humanitarian risks in Latin America and the Caribbean, a region that is not investing enough in keeping its people safe, said a top Red Cross official.

As the Caribbean hurricane season approaches, Walter Cotte, Americas director for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), said the region was making use of early warning systems and was better positioned to deal with the wrath of huge storms, but still needed to spend more on preparing for natural disasters.

After Great Disasters; How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery (2016); by Laurie A. Johnson and Robert B. Olshansky. The 78 page version is a free download.

The Diva highly recommends this short paper, and the price is right. A useful additional to everyone’s library.

Update: The full book is now available for a modest price.

Just so you know, the full-length version, with lots of details for all six countries, is just out this week. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/books/after-great-disasters. The book was just printed last week, and can be ordered for $30 each. In addition, Lincoln tells us that the pdf version will be posted this Friday.

Robert B. Olshansky, FAICP, Professor, Department Head
Dept. of Urban and Regional Planning
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Review of Responses to Disasters and Climate Change: Understanding Vulnerability and Fostering Resilience (2016), by Michele Companion and Miriam S. Chaiken (Eds.). CRC Press. Hardcover is $96.

Reviewed By Simone Domingue, PhD Student, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado Boulder, Graduate Research Assistant, Natural Hazards Center.

In this book editors Michele Companion and Miriam S. Chaiken bring together a range of empirical work that speaks to vulnerability and resilience as social processes. Companion, a sociologist, and Chaiken, a cultural anthropologist, aim to identify factors that reduce suffering caused by hazards and disasters. To this end, they bring together authors in this volume to explore susceptibility to harm and to document best practices in social programming. Taken as a whole, this volume serves as an important resource for scholars and practitioners alike who seek to reduce hazard and disaster losses in a world where risks are unequally shared.

The volume is designed to contribute to the study of “the relationship between humans and the natural, built, and social environment” (p. xxviii).   It includes 23 chapters, representing case studies from 17 countries around the globe. These chapters are written by individuals from various disciplines who use a range of approaches to study vulnerability and community resilience. Authors represent the fields of anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, development studies, emergency management, public policy, political science, planning, and public health. The chapters also employ mixed research methods, but mostly favor qualitative data collection and analyses. The volume also welcomes an expanded definition of “disaster,” as chapters are concerned with chronic environmental stresses, genocide, or other social catastrophes that fall outside of the term’s traditionally defined parameters.

The chapters are organized into three main sections that focus on the following themes: best practices of resilience building programs, factors that contribute to vulnerability and resilience, and the emergence of community level action related to resilience.  The first section of the book contains chapters that emphasize the importance of meaningful engagement for the formulation of context specific risk reduction and adaption measures. The first few chapters in this section highlight how resilience building programs could be more socially inclusive, especially through the privileging of local knowledge. Chapters in this section also provide a critical analyses of policies that manifest in heightened vulnerabilities.   For example, in Chapter 8, the Canadian government’s regulatory apparatus comes under scrutiny for failing to incorporate First Nation knowledge into crude oil transportation development proposals. The second section of the volume focuses on conditions that contribute to food insecurity and the erosion of secure livelihoods. The first chapters deal primarily with determinants of vulnerability and with adaptive strategies, and the following chapters take up the role of gender in reproducing social and environmental inequalities.

The final section features chapters that discuss community scale processes and their contributions to resilience. For instance, Chapter 21 introduces the concept of “guerilla governance,” referring to emergent social groups that operate outside of formal government structures to address unmet community needs following disasters.

By presenting work at the intersection of vulnerability and resiliency, the volume succeeds in not replicating an overly simplistic narrative about “victims” in disasters. This approach to understanding disaster loss often ignores the sets of capacities that communities and individuals hold, and furthermore, ignores the social determinants of vulnerability. For example, Chapter 14 illustrates the complex relation between resilience, vulnerability, and capabilities in a vivid description of displaced migrants in Malawi. The author describes how these individuals regain control of their identity through craft making ventures, concluding that “the production of material goods is a form of control over identity that can be asserted (agency) to countermand negative identifiers that are externally imposed (migrant, refugee, unwanted, intruder, etc.)” (Companion, 2016, p.157). Certainly, the treatment of vulnerability and resilience as dynamic and multidimensional concepts- contingent upon the intersection of numerous forces- is a strength of the volume. For instance, in Chapter 16, the authors examine the complex role gender played following a disaster in a politically and religiously conservative town in Texas. The chapter highlighted the support roles women play in community recovery from wildfire, while also describing how gender roles constrain men’s ability to recover.

Another facet of the volume that should be appreciated is that the selection of articles brings climate change researchers and disaster researchers into dialogue with one another. Perhaps, if readers are fortunate, there will be a second addition of this volume that incorporates additional insights from climate justice literature. This literature also contributes to our understanding of social  vulnerability and equitable resilience building, but has yet to gain traction in hazards and disaster research. Nevertheless, when considered as a whole, the chapters underscore the continued threat global environment change and extreme weather events poses to already precarious livelihoods.

Overall, this volume provides many novel insights for those working to understand and ultimately reduce vulnerabilities in a range of settings. The global reach of the contributions is noteworthy in and of itself, as the insights from each chapter advance understanding of vulnerability across a range of population groups and places. The volume is a timely and welcome addition the literature. For these reasons, the volume should be considered a part of the toolkit of academics and practitioners.  The volume would be especially useful as a text for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in applied programs, and in fields such as emergency management, development studies, humanitarian response, environmental studies, anthropology and applied sociology.

Mass trauma’s emotional toll can disrupt children’s sense of competence

Traumatic events can have a profound effect on communities. Whether it is a terrorist attack or a natural disaster, such as a hurricane or tornado, the aftermath can have lasting effects, especially on children. How children respond in the wake of mass traumatic events is related to their perceptions of competence – or how they view their ability to control a situation. An overwhelming challenge, such as a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, can disrupt the development of that sense of well-being.

For those interested in the topic of mitigation, I recommend the activities and documents produced by the Natural Hazards Mitigation Association.

Two recent articles that NHMA members wrote for the American Planing Association are:  Hazard Mitigation in Disaster Recovery, by Edward A. Thomas, Esq., and Lincoln Walther, FAICP, in Planning for Post Disaster Briefing Papers. Those papers are located at:https://www.planning.org/research/postdisaster/briefingpapers/hazardmitigation.htm