Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative

pled with the increasing frequency of billion-dollar disaster events, such as the recent Hurricane Sandy, highlight some of the challenges to hazards and disaster policy in the United States. American society is also facing challenges to its economic, sociocultural, and environmental systems: The national jobless rate is near historic high values, more than one in six Americans now live in poverty, population migration to the coastal communities continues, and environmental degradation due to development, farming practices, or industrial processes and accidents continues to degrade natural defenses against floods, storm surge, and wildfires. Many of these changes are transformative and long lasting and, coupled with the nation’s inability to act decisively to counteract climate change, portend a future where we are more vulnerable to hazards at multiple scales. Extreme natural events (either unprecedented magnitudes or intensities of natural hazards or the unprecedented consequences of more routine hazards) may become normal occurrences under changing climatic conditions or changes in economic circumstances and social conditions.1,2 Low-probability/high-consequence events and highly improbable ones like earthquakes, pandemics, and other kinds of hazards take on more policy interest as these events become more probable.3-5 From a policy perspective, these unlikely events pose significant risk management challenges, starting with how to encourage investments to lessen the impacts of these disasters (Figure 1). by Susan L. Cutter, Joseph A. Ahearn, Bernard Amadei, Patrick Crawford, Elizabeth A. Eide, Gerald E. Galloway, Jr., Michael F. Goodchild, Howard C. Kunreuther, Meredith Li-Vollmer, Monica Schoch-Spana, Susan C. Scrimshaw, Ellis M. Stanley, Sr., Gene Whitney, and Mary Lou Zoback