In the current issue of the IAEM Bulletin, there is an excellent article by Marko Bourne titled State and Local Governments: Long Term Disaster Recovery Is Not Just About How Much you Can Get from FEMA.  Go to pages 15-18 in this issue: 201410bulletinonline.

Among other things he mentions one of my chief current concerns, which is the need to translate  “… resiliency from a laudable but amorphous concept into measurable results….”

Building a Roadmap to Resilience: Tools for field people:

Everybody is talking about resilience. The idea that people, institutions and states need the right tools, assets and skills to deal with an increasingly complex, interconnected and evolving risk landscape, while retaining the ability to seize opportunities to increase overall well-being, is widely accepted.

This document provides a step by step approach to resilience systems analysis, a tool that helps field practitioners to:

•    prepare for, and facilitate, a successful multi- stakeholder resilience analysis workshop
•    design a roadmap to boost the resilience of communities and societies
•    integrate the results of the analysis into their development and humanitarian programming

Michael Berkowitz: Community is the secret of urban resilience . The author is CEO of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative, an emerging movement in municipal planning and development: the quest to make urban communities far more resilient to social, economic and physical shocks.

Some quotes from the article:

With so many cities clamoring to participate, what will convince the 100 Resilient Cities to pick one over another? Answer: the camaraderie of its citizens, the fabric of its churches and religious organization, even the footprint of the transportation network and how it defines where neighborhoods end and begin.

“We see a key differentiator is community cohesion,” Berkowitz noted. “In other words, how much do neighbors check on neighbors? How tight-knit are communities that can come together during stresses or after shocks like earthquakes, big floods or hurricanes? Communities that are cohesive in that way always rebound better or are more resilient.”

For those readers who like infographics, here is a new one on resilience. [NOTE: It prints out best in landscape mode.]

My personal take is to disagree with the box that compares the resilience and preparedness approaches. I welcome your comments.

Thanks to Chris Jones for sending me the direct link. Chris noted:

Infographics make things clear,
so Claire’s readers hold them dear.
A picture provides,
a simple guide,
so to truth, we can get near.

See this new website mounted by the National Academy of Sciences on Resilience.  See also the details on the site for a webinar in early Sept.

Please see these two documents from the Housing & Urban Development (HUD) Portal.

In an earlier post I noted the National Disaster Resilience Competition Overview.  Newly available are the the Eligibility Guidelines.  [Neither document is dated.]

Many thanks to Elaine M. Sudanowicz for providing me with these  URLs.