Sustainable Resilience Planning for Natural Hazard Events

Dear Colleagues,

The concept of resilience has been evolving over the past decade as a way to address the current and future challenges nations, states, and cities face from a changing climate. Understanding how the environment (natural and built), climate event risk, societal interactions, and governance reflect community resilience for adaptive management is critical for envisioning urban and natural environments that can persist through extreme weather events and longer-term shifts in climate. To be successful, this interaction of these five domains must result in maintaining quality of life and ensuring equal access to the benefits or the protection from harm for all segments of the population. Exhaustive literature reviews of climate resilience approaches have been conducted examining the two primary elements of resilience—vulnerability and recoverability. The results of these reviews addressed many existing frameworks integrating the above five major areas of resilience. While some aspects of a resilience model are available for existing sources, no comprehensive approaches are available. This Special Issue will address conceptual models for resilience to climate events that incorporate some available structures, and addresses these five domains at a national, regional, state, and county spatial scale for a variety of climate-induced events ranging from superstorms to droughts and their concomitant events such as wildfires, floods, and pest invasions. These conceptualizations should be developed in a manner that will permit comparisons among governance units (e.g., counties) and permit an examination of best reliance practices.

Natural disasters often impose significant and long-lasting stress on financial, social, and ecological systems. From Atlantic hurricanes to Midwest tornadoes to Western wildfires, no corner of the United States is immune from the threat of a devastating natural hazard event. Across the nation, there is a recognition that the benefits of creating environments resilient to adverse natural hazard events help promote and sustain county and community success over time. The challenge for communities is in finding ways to balance the need to preserve the socioecological systems on which they depend in the face of constantly changing natural hazard threats. This Special Issue is designed as an endpoint for characterizing national/state/county/community resilience outcomes that are based on risk profiles and responsive to changes in governance, societal, built, and natural system characteristics. By evaluating the factors that influence vulnerability and recoverability, an estimation of resilience can quantify how changes in these characteristics will impact resilience given specific hazard profiles. Ultimately, this knowledge will help communities identify potential areas to target for increasing resilience to natural hazard events.

Dr. James Kevin Summers
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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• resilience
• natural hazards
• climate adaptation
• flooding
• hurricanes
• tornadoes