Sustainability and Community Resilience II. The Importance of Perceived Self-Interest By Dr. John Plodinec, Firestorm Expert Council Member.  John is the Associate Director for the Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In this role, he is responsible for identifying and evaluating technologies useful for enhancing community resilience. He also is playing a leading role in development of CARRI’s Community Resilience System. He has been heavily involved with CARRI’s engagement with the Charleston, SC, region. Read more about Dr. Plodinec here In the last post, I talked about the importance of time in trying to understand the relationship between sustainability and community resilience. Another definition is useful in this discussion – community. We can define a community as a group of individuals and organizations bound together by...

Sustainability and Community Resilience   The Importance of Time To introduce this second article from Dr. John Plodinec on the subject of Sustainability and Community Resilience, we must first reference the Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory - CARRI - definition of Community Resilience: Definition of Community Resilience WHAT IS RESILIENCE? The capability to anticipate risk, limit impact, and bounce back rapidly through survival, adaptability, evolution, and growth in the face of turbulent change. When a community is truly resilient, it should be able to avoid the cascading system failures to help minimize any disaster's disruption to everyday life and the local economy.  A resilient community is not only prepared to help prevent or minimize the loss or damage to life, property and the environment, but also it has the ...

Disasters have Direction On Community Resilience by Dr John Plodinec Our friends at CARRI – The Community and Regional Resilience Institute  -have posed an interesting concept to think about:  Disasters Have Direction – What Does That Mean for Community Resilience? This guest article is by Dr. John Plodinec.  John is the Associate Director for the Community and Regional Resilience Institute (CARRI) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In this role, he is responsible for identifying and evaluating technologies useful for enhancing community resilience. He also is playing a leading role in development of CARRI's Community Resilience System. He has been heavily involved with CARRI's engagement with the Charleston, SC, region. Read more about Dr. Plodinec here Disasters Have Direction – What Does That Mean for Community Resilience? For a few years, FEMA and DHS have champion...

Munich Re: First-Half Losses Make 2011 Costliest for Natural Disasters Reference Article: The accumulation of 100 natural disasters in the United States produced an excess of $18 billion (and climbing) insured losses in the first half of 2011 alone. The global distribution of natural loss events, including the 9.0-magnitude earthquake in Japan, along with the resultant tsunami; the earthquake and flooding in New Zealand; and the tornadoes and flooding in the U.S., has already made 2011 the costliest year for natural disasters on record. Economist Dr. Robert P. Hartwig cited a “sense of rewriting the economics of the history of disaster in the U.S. and on the global scale.” Natural Disaster Business Costs    Analysis by Jim Satterfield, COO Firestorm Solutions: Disaster costs in the U.S. this year are already 80 percent above normal with more than five months remaining and...