In the span of less than two weeks, Hurricanes Helene and Milton stacked misery on the state of Florida and along the East Coast with wind, rain, flooding, and storm surges, and recovery efforts from both storms continue to sit at the top of the news.
As the frequency and intensity of weather-based natural disasters continues to climb due to climate change, the ways in which communities and charitable disaster relief programs plan their relief efforts must change as well.
They can’t just bounce back. They have to bounce forward.
During an appearance on O’Neill Speaks, the official podcast of the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Professor Beth Gazley emphasized the principal of resiliency—the ability of communities and organizations to recover from disasters—needs to be taken a step further at the planning level.
“If you think about resiliency, it’s not just bouncing back to where you were before,” Gazley said. “Disaster planners don’t think that way anymore. They think about bouncing forward and making that organization more resistant, more weather-hardy than it was before. … What they’re not doing is thinking about the exponential increase in the risks we’re seeing. They are not having board-level conversations about climate change as a strategic imperative. That’s a concern because boards are really only thinking ahead to the next disaster. They’re not thinking that we might be in a cycle where we’re getting a hurricane every two weeks.”
From a planning standpoint, Gazley said both organizations and communities need to recognize the reality of a changing climate and adjust their approaches accordingly.
“Resiliency is also about attitude,” Gazley said. “It’s about thinking differently about where we live, about what our infrastructure looks like. … It looks a lot more politically feasible to be sending in the troops in the white trucks that are going to fix your utilities than it is rebuilding bridges ahead of disasters. Strengthening infrastructure ahead of a disaster is expensive, and it’s not as physically easy to accomplish.
“There’s a term that’s not politically friendly right now nobody wants to talk about, and it’s the idea of planned retreat. I would argue it’s a kind of resiliency when you say, ‘You know, it doesn’t make sense to live in a community where my house is one-foot above the water table, so if it floods, my house is going to flood.’ It’s about thinking differently about where we live, what our infrastructure looks like.”
O’Neill Speaks can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast service.
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