No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each. One way to reduce the impacts of disasters on the nation and its communities is to invest in enhancing resilience-the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative addresses the broad issue of increasing the nation's resilience to disasters. This book defines "national resilience", describes the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters, and frames the main issues related to increasing resilience in the United States. It also provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience and outlines additional information, data, gaps, and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation's resilience to disasters. Additionally, the book's authoring committee makes recommendations about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States. Enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward. Disaster Resilience confronts the topic of how to increase the nation's resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. Increasing disaster resilience is an imperative that requires the collective will of the nation and its communities. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.

Over the past decade, resilience has gained significant traction across the nation and innovative programs are showing exciting progress in building resilient communities. For communities to be prepared for future extreme weather and climate events, as well as the chronic daily stressors, the momentum of implementing and taking action to build community resilience should continue to be fostered and expanded. Building on its many efforts dedicated to increasing and enhancing resilience, the Resilient America Roundtable hosted the State of Resilience Leadership Forum and Community Workshop on June 28 and 29, 2016. This activity brought together diverse decision makers, experts, practitioners, and community stakeholders, including representatives from academia, government, the private sector, foundations, and nonprofit organizations, to consider the results of years of investment, experimentation, and research in building resilience, take stock of these many initiatives and efforts, and share their experiences in building more resilient communities. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

In the United States, people of color are disproportionally more likely to live in environments with poor air quality, in close proximity to toxic waste, and in locations more vulnerable to climate change and extreme weather events. In many vulnerable neighborhoods, structural racism and classism prevent residents from having a seat at the table when decisions are made about their community. In an effort to overcome power imbalances and ensure local knowledge informs decision-making, a new approach to community engagement is essential. In Resilience for All, Barbara Brown Wilson looks at less conventional, but often more effective methods to make communities more resilient. She takes an in-depth look at what equitable, positive change through community-driven design looks like in four communities—East Biloxi, Mississippi; the Lower East Side of Manhattan; the Denby neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan; and the Cully neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. These vulnerable communities have prevailed in spite of serious urban stressors such as climate change, gentrification, and disinvestment. Wilson looks at how the lessons in the case studies and other examples might more broadly inform future practice. She shows how community-driven design projects in underserved neighborhoods can not only change the built world, but also provide opportunities for residents to build their own capacities.

In Resilience: The Science of Adaptation to Climate Change leading experts analyze and question ongoing adaptation interventions. Contributions span different disciplinary perspectives, from law to engineering, and cover different regions from Africa to the Pacific. Chapters assess the need for adaptation, highlighting climate change impacts such as sea level rise, increases in temperature, changing hydrological variability, and threats to food security. The book then discusses the state of global legislation and means of tracking progress. It reviews ways to build resilience in a range of contexts— from the Arctic, to small island states, to urban areas, across food and energy systems. Critical tools for adaptation planning are highlighted - from social capital and ethics, to decision support systems, to innovative finance and risk transfer mechanisms. Controversies related to geoengineering and migration are also discussed. This book is an indispensable resource for scientists, practitioners, and policy makers working in climate change adaptation, sustainable development, ecosystem management, and urban planning. Provides a summary of tools and methods used in adaptation including recent innovations Includes chapters from a diverse range of authors from academic institutions, humanitarian organizations, and the United Nations Evaluates adaptation options, highlighting gaps in knowledge where further research or new tools are needed

Resilience is a community's ability to withstand and quickly recover from disasters and other hazardous events. This comprehensive guide to community resilience for state and local officials, disaster relief organizations, and concerned attorneys and community members encapsulates the ABA's commitment to promoting community resilience as set forth in Resolution 108, which is included as an appendix.

Increasingly, cracks are appearing in the capacity of communities, ecosystems, and landscapes to provide the goods and services that sustain our planet's well-being. The response from most quarters has been for "more of the same" that created the situation in the first place: more control, more intensification, and greater efficiency. "Resilience thinking" offers a different way of understanding the world and a new approach to managing resources. It embraces human and natural systems as complex entities continually adapting through cycles of change, and seeks to understand the qualities of a system that must be maintained or enhanced in order to achieve sustainability. It explains why greater efficiency by itself cannot solve resource problems and offers a constructive alternative that opens up options rather than closing them down. In Resilience Thinking, scientist Brian Walker and science writer David Salt present an accessible introduction to the emerging paradigm of resilience. The book arose out of appeals from colleagues in science and industry for a plainly written account of what resilience is all about and how a resilience approach differs from current practices. Rather than complicated theory, the book offers a conceptual overview along with five case studies of resilience thinking in the real world. It is an engaging and important work for anyone interested in managing risk in a complex world.