California Droughts Could Have Dangerous Ripple Effects. Some excerpts:

Epic droughts like the one gripping California for three years now may become more frequent in the future due to climate change, according to new research.

This will not only strain the drinking-water supplies for California’s 38 million people, but will also induce a cascade of other hazards — including fires, floods and poor water quality — as populations continue to grow statewide, scientists say.

From EM magazine:  Cities Adopt Cloud-Based Approaches to Disaster Recovery; New York City and Asheville, N.C., have both adopted private clouds to provide disaster recovery services, with promising results.

If you are like me, you would like to know more about cloud computing. See this explanatory article.

Thanks to Brandon Greenberg, Eric Holdeman, and EM magazine for the above sources.

Here are two takes on what can be done at the local level:

From ICMA:  The Critical Ingredients of Community Resiliency
Communities that cultivate a network of institutions and pay attention to the “3 Es” of resiliency will be better able to respond and adapt to new challenges.

From Governing magazine: Community Resilience....

In the past few weeks, there has been a deluge of new reports, as well as other reports that escaped my notice in past months. Since I can barely count and list them, I asked for readers’ help in reviewing them.  Don Watson was gracious enough to agree to review some selected reports on Infrastructure Risk Reduction and Resilience (DRR) and he also added some related citations.

Mr. Donald Watson is an architect and planner, author of Design for Flooding: Resilience to Climate Change (Wiley 2011) and Editor-in-Chief, Time-Saver Standards for Urban Design (McGraw-Hill 2003). He also is a major contributor to this blog.

First, a few words about the words “critical infrastructure.” The term infrastructure, more specifically, physical infrastructure, includes roads, rails, bridges, buildings, ports, airports, as well as civil structures for water, sewer, fuels, utilities, and communication systems. In short, almost everything that is man-made. It also includes structures, such as dams, levees, coastal water gates and barriers, that impact wetlands, forests, river and shoreline resources and natural systems. The term aging infrastructure is a succinct diagnosis given in the 2013 “Report Card for America’s Infrastructure” to characterize the need for investment to maintain U.S. infrastructure, assigning the grade of D+ based on present physical condition and needed investment for improvement. That is, even without stress or risk of disruption, to ignore such condition could itself be called an invitation to risk of disaster.

In the emerging disciplines of disaster risk reduction, the terms critical infrastructure(s) and lifeline systems have become the operating terms of reference, and include finance, health, food, security and emergency management services.

Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21) “Critical Infrastructure and resilience” identifies 16 critical infrastructure sectors. The definition of “critical infrastructure” varies across States. PlaNYC, the sustainability and resiliency plan for New York City, for example, identifies the need for designating selected gas stations, pharmacies and medical clinics to meet high standards of storm protection and operational return to service during or following an emergency.

In any combination of sectors or at any scale from local to national, there are “weak link” vulnerabilities. The emergency management field (among other strategic planning disciplines) uses “table top exercises” or “scenarios” to simulate what might happen when any particular system (a campus, a city, a region) is subject to stress and disruption (man-made or natural). Any number of “resilience” strategies can be proposed, e.g., to eliminate or go around weak links, to provide alternatives and redundancies, to “decouple” one sector from others to cut short possible “cascading impacts.” Site-scale utility systems (such as district heating and power) and integrated communications (partnerships among cell phone service providers) are examples of such strategies.

The reports and additional references cited here indicate the scale of critical infrastructure challenges following Hurricane Sandy, emphasizing the need for collaboration across private and public sectors to design for disaster risk reduction and resilience.

The best of what can come of such discussions is that widespread public understanding of critical infrastructure risks can support the scale and long-term commitment of response appropriate to improve and maintain the systems—natural and man made—by which community prosperity, safety and health are maintained and flourish.

CRS report: The Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Strategy: in Brief, by Jared Brown. Cited in this blog in Dec.

Like other CRS documents, the report is written clearly and succinctly, as a briefing paper for members of Congress. The report references several post-Sandy documents, in particular recommendations made by the U.S. Presidential Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Strategy: Stronger Communities, a Resilient Region, August 2013.

The Report notes that, following expenditures approved to date and continuing for Hurricane Sandy Recovery, the implementation for new infrastructure projects and repair/replacement of existing infrastructure, is multi-year, even decades-long. The report provides some detail to state the need for long term commitment to disaster risk reduction, well beyond authorized Sandy recovery, requiring action singly or jointly by the executive branch, Congress, or state and local governments for lessons learned to apply to future disasters.

The larger challenge, perhaps too modestly stated in this report, is that Sandy is not the first or the last of disasters beyond our prior measures of preparedness.
….”One of many lessons learned …[in responding to prior and present disasters]… is that the long-term community recovery process from a catastrophic disaster could be just as difficult and daunting, if not more so, than the immediate response process.” [p. 10]

This is the key message delivered to Congress in this report, which will remain with the nation for decades and thus bears repeating until it resonates across all discussions of infrastructure and community resilience.

RAND.  The Hurricane Rebuilding Task Force’s Infrastructure Resilience Guidelines: An Initial Assessment of Implementation by Federal Agencies. Cited in this blog in December.

Like the CRS Report noted above, the RAND Report references the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force, Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Strategy of August 2013. The RAND Report examines the Sandy Task Force guidelines as enacted to date, to identify lessons learned and to consider whether the same guidelines could be implemented beyond and after the current Hurricane Sandy rebuilding programs.

The CRS and RAND Reports are similar. RAND is a bit more expansive. CRS raises the need to continue Sandy Rebuilding lessons over the long term and to future disasters. The RAND study asks how resilience guidelines and lessons might be extended even more broadly, to non-disaster applications.

The RAND Report is carefully presented, based upon 67 interviews, representing government and non-governmental individuals and organizations, some who received Sandy funding, others who did not, all representing a cross section of informed actors in the disaster risk reduction field.

Among issues raised are complexities of interpretations and measures (metrics) for resilience, difficulty to evaluate intended progress, and need for more streamlined approaches to prioritizing the many plans and projects related to resilience. This is an obvious “gap,” that results from each individual community making its own plan and its own project lists, absent a regional overview.

The RAND Report describes a consensus recommendation to develop the scientific evidence to guide decisions about how to meet resilience performance standards—for more technical depth to support comprehensive strategies for resilience. Those interviewed credit the federal government for leadership in implementation of resilience guidelines as a result of its focus on resilience principles evident in all of its multiple initiatives.

Many interviewees stated how important it is to establish a community vision and project priorities prior to a disaster and to ensure that the vision is not overlooked because of immediate needs and stress in disaster recovery.

The RAND Report has additional details as to concerns identified by communities in disaster recovery. Two questions are identified as remaining for policy and program design:
• How should decision makers balance environmental concerns and preferences for risk reduction in a specific setting?
• What methods should be followed when different stakeholder perspectives affect one another in a systems context?
…pointing out that, “When the two approaches are implemented adjacently, this may compromise the performance of both and deliver a less-reliable solution for the entire region.”

If one were to summarize the recommendations, they might be stated as:
Make a plan. Stick to it. Be ready for the long haul. Engage the entire set of critical infrastructure sectors and partners, and go regional (to address the conflicts between local approaches that com promise one another).

The RAND report concludes with discussion, supported by the interviews, that “a more comprehensive consideration of how to improve national resilience may be needed.” The prima facie evidence of both the CRS and the RAND Reports is the need to response to critical infrastructure challenges is emphatically required.

The means to work towards this goal are suggested by the examples and interviews in these reports, fully cited as evidence to address critical infrastructure needs and opportunities. One can say that, ultimately, resilience is measured by how actively and effectively that goal is realized.

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES for critical infrastructure and resilience:

American Society of Civil Engineers. Report Card for America’s Infrastructure (2013)

American Society of Civil Engineers. Guiding Principles for the Nation’s Critical Infrastructure (2009)

NOAA-USACE.  (2013). Infrastructure Systems Rebuilding Principles (4 pp.)

PwC. Rebuilding for resilience: Fortifying infrastructure to withstand disaster (2013)

U.S. Presidential Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force. Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Strategy: Stronger Communities, a Resilient Region (2013).

U.S. DHS. National Infrastructure Protection Plan (2013)

From the Washington Post: Islamic State Is Failing at Being a State. We have seen this before: in the West Bank, Gaza, and many other places. After wholesale destruction – whether from a disaster or from war or civil conflict – the recovery process is very difficult to accomplish. And the governance issues are primary. Being able to provide and maintain municipal systems and services – – especially if they are done equitably, efficiently, and effectively —  is not as easy as many people think.

Back in August of this year, I provided a posting about the rebuilding of Gaza, which cited 3 articles on the topic. You can see that posting via this link.

Not much has been published in recent months about Gaza, but this past week (Dec. 25), the Guardian (UK) published an article about the reconstruction progress in Gaza. And the news is not good. See: Corruption hampers effort to rebuild Gaza after summer conflict; Coupon plan fails to stop black market in cement, while too few materials are making it across border into strip

U.N. Disaster Chief Warns of More Natural Catastrophes to Come

Thailand’s Khao Lak coast 10 years ago was a wasteland of palm beaches littered with the detritus of destroyed hotels and corpses blackened by the tropical sun.

Margareta Wahlstrom, the United Nations’ top official on natural disasters, will be in Khao Lak on Friday for the anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami with a message: “Expect events to happen that you have never seen before. There will be no letup in the coming decades.”

Spurred partly by the tsunami, which the United Nations says killed more than 227,000 people, many countries have built early warning systems and other defenses against natural disasters, said Ms. Wahlstrom, the head of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction.

The perception among some developed countries that disasters mostly afflict poor countries has changed since Hurricanes Katrina in 2005 and Sandy in 2012, earthquakes in Italy, repeated heavy flooding in Central Europe and wildfires in the United States and Russia. “Everywhere, things are going on that didn’t go on 10 years ago,” Ms. Wahlstrom said.

As is true in the U.S. major changes seem to occur slowly. See: One year after ice storm, Toronto unveils slew of procedure changes

One year after layers of ice brought down trees around the GTA and left hundreds of thousands of people without power, the City of Toronto has applied for $64.2-million in funding from the province and announced a slew of changes to better handle natural disasters in the future.

The changes bring in the Canadian Red Cross Society as a disaster responder under a formalized agreement, introduce a committee of social services to help facilitate aid to vulnerable populations and seek a closer relationship between Toronto’s 311 service and Toronto Hydro. The funding will help the city cope with more than $106-million in cleanup and disaster response costs.

But a year later, some recommendations from the disaster have yet to be implemented. The city is still in talks with Toronto Hydro over line clearances for trees, something the power agency’s independent report highlighted as a priority. The city is also still trying to determine just how much of the urban canopy — encompassing 10.2 million trees — was decimated in the ice storm.

Canada’s Humanitarian Sector Gears up to Adapt and Innovate. Some excerpts:

Adaptation. Innovation. These two words are usually associated with the private sector. It’s a well-practiced mantra that business, management and employees must adapt and innovate in order to thrive in the frenetic global marketplace. Now there are signs that the humanitarian sector is cautiously following suit.

Made up of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that deliver aid and assistance during human-made and natural disasters, the sector is vast. Ironically, it’s also at a crisis point: It not only faces more demands on its resources, but more complex problems related to climate change, conflict and extremism that simply have no easy solutions. To weather these changes, the Canadian humanitarian sector is coming together to learn how adaptation and innovation can improve its ability to respond effectively to the record number of people in need of assistance.