Disaster Recovery Efforts Can Serve More than One Goal
A “multisolving” recovery would get a region up and running quickly while also protecting climate and biodiversity, increasing community well-being and preparing for future shocks.
A “multisolving” recovery would get a region up and running quickly while also protecting climate and biodiversity, increasing community well-being and preparing for future shocks.
This national crisis calls for a new model for economic disaster recovery. We propose a new strategy ‘resettlement in place’ – it is based on best practices in refugee resettlement and social intelligence, a model to harness local data and lessons learned from previous disasters, including Chicago’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
As part of CAWR’s Stabilisation Agriculture Programme, I recently visited Chimanimani district in Zimbabwe to initiate comparative research on how conventional and agroecologically managed landscapes coped with the impacts of Cyclone Idai in March 2019. Idai deposited the total annual rainfall in the first twelve hours alone – yet sat over and devastated Chimanimani for three days.
In this episode of The Response, we examine the events that led up to the Grenfell Tower fire and learn how the community has responded through the voices of survivors, their families, and others who were impacted.
Super Typhoon Yutu made history as the worst storm to hit United States soil since 1935. The Category 5 storm, with sustained winds of 180 mph, wreaked havoc on the islands of Saipan and Tinian, which are part of the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The storm left thousands of residents without homes.
Maybe the best thing we can do in the wake of a disaster is to cultivate closely knit, organized, and empowered communities that are more resilient during catastrophes and better able to demand the resources they need to not only survive those acute disasters, but to rebuild on a more just and sustainable basis.
We can, and should, theorise the broader politics of disaster. However, everyday stories of post-disaster action and resistance shed light on the small-scale, experimental grassroots interventions that bring forward hope in the midst of crisis.
A just recovery for Puerto Rico not only means rebuilding what Maria destroyed, but reclaiming the political and economic agency stifled by American colonialism.
As Southern California rebuilds, will it be back to business as usual, or will a climate change-induced “new normal” help spur efforts at greater resilience?
Now the Wine Country fires are out and Richard is available to come back on Locus Focus for this episode, but instead of talking about the original topic we’re going to look at how all the disasters we’ve witnessed this year are highlighting critical lessons about what it means not only to build a sustainable future but one that is resilient as well.
What Sandy’s inequalities show is that around America’s largest metropolis as much as in other corners of our nation and planet, the battle against global warming is also a battle for environmental justice.
The growing effects of climate change, including climbing global temperatures and rising sea levels, are forecast to have an increasing economic impact on state and local governments in the United States. “This will be a growing negative credit factor for issuers without sufficient adaptation and mitigation strategies,” Moody’s noted in a statement released in conjunction with the report.