DESIGNING RESILIENCE
FOR COMMUNITIES AT RISK
LOUISE K. COMFORT, UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH,
PITTSBURGH, PA 15260, [email protected]
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
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….
• ….or developing capacity to manage risk more efficiently
KEY FACTORS THAT UNDERLIE RISK
• Insufficient monitoring of changing environment
• Heterogeneity in populations exposed to risk
• Inability to recognize threats in different arenas of
action
• Asymmetry in information processes among different
constituent groups
• Inability to mobilize collective action to counter threat
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
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
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
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
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
Figure 1. Network Diagram of Interacting Organizations in the Haiti
Earthquake Response System, January 12 – February 3, 2010
Table 2
Small World Network within Haiti Response System, January 12- February 3, 2010
Network Measure
Clustering Coefficient (CANA)
0.393
Average Distance (CANA)
3.251
Average Clustering (Random Graph)
0.052
Average Distance (Random Graph)
2.817
Clustering Ratio
7.569
Distance Ratio
1.154
Small World Ratio
6.559
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 decisionmaking 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.
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
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