Summary

Our research aims to provide insight into transforming the disaster risk management community so that effectiveness is an embedded practice that encapsulates all needs, including the needs of the most historically impacted. Supporting the resilience and recovery of historically impacted communities requires identifying who is overlooked in plans and programs, devising strategies that include and support those populations, and measuring the effectiveness of those strategies by tracking resilience and post-disaster recovery outcomes. While there are many definitions of resilience, we adopt a broad interpretation that incorporates pre- and post-event activities: “Community resilience is the capacity to anticipate, plan for, and adapt to adversity, and transform during recovery into healthier and less vulnerable,” communities.

Our Year 10 proposal will further the mission of the grant and continue our work from Years 8 and 9. During Year 8, we worked toward assessing the use of appropriate metrics for measuring, assessing, and meeting the needs of historically impacted populations in hazard mitigation and post-disaster recovery phases. We also collected data from government disaster recovery and hazard mitigation records, hazard mitigation and comprehensive plans, and interviews to help inform future phases of data collection and analysis.

In Year 9, we continued to use our framework within a theory of change to assess how historically impacted groups are effectively identified and supported in mitigation and recovery. Here, we cross-examined our quantitative and qualitative findings. Our findings revealed areas of convergence across different data sources.

In Year 10, we will host a workshop for local government officials where we will share our prior years’ results and recommendations on the metrics for measuring, assessing, and meeting the needs of historically impacted populations. We will then collect participants’ feedback, include their feedback in our analyses, and will enrich our recommendations given their on-the-ground professional experience. We will then begin to construct a practitioner-friendly protocol to analyze how the emergency management community can integrate indicators and policies.

Investigators