Introducing Six Foundations for Building Community Resilience, PCI’s new report which describes how communities can approach the full scope of the 21st century’s challenges equitably and sustainably.
It’s all too easy to look at the news these days and find an instant reminder of how vulnerable, and in some cases broken, our communities are—whether the risks they face are due to terrorism, natural disasters, economic struggles, dilapidated infrastructure, or a dozen other disruptive forces. I could quickly provide some examples, torn from this week’s headlines, but if you’re reading this a month, a year, or decade from now it’s likely the task will be just as easy.
This is partly true, of course, because vulnerability has always been part of human communities. But in this age of global interconnectedness, those vulnerabilities are not only more complex and systemic, they’re chronic.
Since Post Carbon Institute’s formation a little over a decade ago, we’ve seen interest in building community resilience skyrocket—from the early days of the grassroots relocalization and Transition movements, in response to concerns about climate change and peak oil, to the more recent initiatives of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the United Nations to prepare cities for acute disasters.
In particular, interest in building climate resilience has grown exponentially since Hurricane Sandy hit the U.S. Northeast in 2012, and as the need for climate adaptation, not just mitigation, has become more and more evident.
Having ourselves promoted community resilience for years, we’ve been pleased to see the concept of resilience being embraced by a diverse collection of grassroots groups, government agencies, politicians, and philanthropists. But we’re also eager to ensure that community resilience building isn’t simply adopted an aspirational goal divorced of concrete strategies, or as a strategy to “bounce back” from one specific set of disruptions to a normal state that no longer exists.
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