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CARRI Research Reports

  • CARRI Research Report 1 - Community and Regional Resilience: Perspectives from Hazards, Disasters, and Emergency Management  - FINAL_CUTTER_9-25-08.pdf

Written by Susan L. Cutter, Lindsey Barnes, Melissa Berry, Christopher Burton, Elijah Evans, Eric Tate and Jennifer Webb from the Hazards & Vulnerability Research Institute

This research paper outlines what makes people and places vulnerable, including location, infrastructure and economic factors; what makes communities resilient, including recognizing and understanding hazards and planning for disaster recover, planning and land use and development, which includes building standards, development regulations, critical public facilities and information dissemination; and barriers to planning for resilience, which looked at federal and state barriers, policies and commitment among governments at all levels.

Written by Susi Moser with Research and Consulting; Institute of Marine Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz


This report provides relevant insights on resilience from the pertinent global change literature to complement critical insights gleaned from the hazards and ecological literatures by other collaborators to the CARRI project. This study reviews definitions and the emerging understanding of resilience in the social sciences.  It also discusses a number of aspects feeding into resilience, such as vulnerability, adaptive capacity, and social capital.  Lastly, the report points to some promising research frontiers on resilience in the human dimensions field.

  • CARRI Research Report 3 - Community Resilience:  Lessons from New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina - FINAL_COLTEN_9-25-08.pdf

Written by Craig Colten from Louisiana State University;  Robert Kates, an independent scholar; and Shirley Laska with the University of New Orleans
 

This report examines the vulnerability and resilience in New Orleans, both throughout its history and after Hurricane Katrina.  The study highlights the anticipation of a major hurricane like Katrina and examines the risks that were not addressed, such as disrupted funding to the Corps of Engineers, which left levees incomplete and construction standards for flooding that were not met. 

Also examined are the problems that arose during and immediately following the crisis, including disrupted communication and transportation; overwhelmed institutional response and confusion; and the inability of aid and funding to reach those in need.  The report also looks at the lessons learned in order to help New Orleans and other communities understand and better prepare themselves for recovery from future disasters.

Written by Betty Hearn Morrow with SocResearch Miami
 

This study addresses the key social factors that make a community vulnerable and what needs to be changed in order to become resilient.  The study showes that issues such as economic status, ethnicity, gender and education level play a tremendous role in a community's ability to be resilient, and that a community is only as resilient as its weakest link.  The report shows that in order to change and become resilient, communities must address their education, employment and housing vulnerabilities; find ways to reach high risk populations, which include disseminating information in different languages and at various reading levels, as well as communicating with existing community networks, like women's groups, church networks and communicating to extended families of ethnic minorities through children; and finally, a community must have civic participation at all levels and permanent and sufficient funding sources to be truly resilient.

Written by Lance Gunderson, Emory University

Ecological resilience, adaptive cycles, and panarchy are all concepts developed to explain abrupt and often surprising changes in complex socio-ecological systems prone to disturbances.  These types of change involve qualitative and quantitative changes in system structure and processes.  This paper compares theories of ecological resilience, adaptive cycles, and panarchies between ecological and human community systems. At least five ideas emerge from this comparison and have broad implications for attempting to manage complex systems with human and ecological components in the face of recurring natural disasters.

  • CARRI Research Report 6 - Disaster Response:  Research Findings and Their Implications for Resilience Measures - Research Report 6 Tierney

Written by Kathleen Tierney, University of Colorado at Boulder

This report provides an overview of research on disaster response.  The report first discusses issues of disaster scale and provides information on the disaster response research tradition.  It then discusses the concept of resilience and its applicability to the response phase of disasters.  The report then turns to summarizing what is known about how the public responds before, during, and immediately after disasters. Next, research findings on organizational responses are reviewed, and integrated within these research reviews are suggestions regarding resilience indicators that are specific to the post-disaster response period.

Written by Thomas J. Wilbanks, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

This paper considers (a) current knowledge about how geographic scale matters for climate change and other sustainability issues relates to (b) the four dimensions of resilience defined for the initial stages of the Community and Regional Resilience Initiative (CARRI).   The four dimensions of a resilient community are (CARRI 2007, 2009):

  • It anticipates: problems, opportunities, and potentials for surprises.
  • It reduces vulnerabilities: related to development paths, socioeconomic conditions, and sensitivities to possible threats.
  • It responds: effectively, fairly, and legitimately.
  • It recovers: rapidly, better, safer, and fairer.

Section II of the paper summarizes the body of literature about how scale matters, along with the concepts of scale featured in that literature. Section III relates these concepts to the resiliency dimensions and briefly considers key issues in how scale matters for resilience. Section IV very briefly considers New Orleans as a case in point, and Section V summarizes the main challenges and uncertainties.

Written by Adam Rose, Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, University of Southern California.

The purpose of this report is to explain how economic resilience has evolved into a meaningful, quantifiable, measurable, and actionable concept. The report summarizes the literature on economic resilience and how it can be expanded by work in related fields and on related concepts. It then focuses on a specific set of definitions of various dimensions of the concept, stemming from a combination of the author's own work and a general consensus of researchers in the field. The report concludes with a summary of the many dimensions of resilience.

  • CARRI Research Report 9 -  Building Community Resilience: A Summary of Case Studies from Charleston, Gulfport, and Memphis CARRI Research Report 9

Written by Craig E. Colten, Carl O. Sauer Professor, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University

Building resilience in communities and their surrounding regions is a process that seeks to improve their ability to contend with the overwhelming impacts of hazard events.  Drawing on concepts from psychology, engineering, and ecology, researchers have been discussing and investigating the notion of resilience in human communities. Fitting within this broad area of study, this report summarizes three case studies prepared by the Community and Regional Resilience Institute and directed by staff at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Researchers studied the Charleston/North Charleston, South Carolina, metropolitan statistical area; Gulfport, Mississippi; and the six-county Memphis, Tennessee, Urban Area and conducted detailed investigations of existing resilience and efforts to enhance resilience in these communities. This summary report highlights the findings and presents them within a common organizational framework.

Written by Fran H. Norris, Dartmouth Medical School; National Center for PTSD; National Center for Disaster Mental Health Research; National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism

It is important to recognize that the resilience of communities is dependent upon the resilience of the individuals who compose them. Influences between individual and community are mutual, transactional, and bidirectional. Effective promotion of community resilience therefore requires knowledge of the various psychological factors that influence individual and collective behavior before and after adverse events. The purpose of this review is to summarize perspectives from behavioral science that are useful for understanding the resilience of individuals. The review gives particular attention to those concepts that are likely to be most specific to a behavioral science perspective, relative to sociological or natural science perspectives. Thus, it focuses heavily on how human cognitions (e.g., core belief systems, appraisals, attributions) influence action (i.e., goal-directed behavior).