FEMA recently released new National Resilience Guidance (NRG), which sets out to provide “critical concepts…to comprehensively address the risks caused by both acute shocks and chronic community stressors.”
Crucial to that aim are implementing the seven principles advanced to strengthen resilience. What are they?
Read on to find out.
How does the NRG define resilience?
Indeed, the NRG, subtitled a “Collaborative Approach to Building Resilience,” seeks to facilitate a more resilient nation through communities that thrive in social, economic, environmental, and secure institutional systems.
How does the document define resilience, though?
Here, resilience means the ability to prepare for threats and hazards, adapt to changing conditions, and withstand and recover rapidly from adverse conditions and disruptions.
Shocks versus stressors
Ensuring national resilience, as the NRG advocates, entails lessening the impacts of shocks as well as addressing stressors.
But what does each mean?
Shocks are acute incidents, such as severe weather events. Severe weather events, in particular, loom large in the NRG, written as it was in the aftermath of 2023’s record-breaking 28-billion-dollar weather and climate disasters.
Shocks, of course, can’t be disentangled from stressors, which exacerbate the impact of acute incidents.
Stressors are long-term strains. They include deteriorating infrastructure, environmental degradation, and extreme weather amplified by climate change.
Seven principles to strengthen resilience
How then to strengthen resilience by adequately addressing both shocks and stressors? The NRG puts the following seven principles as the foundation of a more resilient nation:
1. Threats and hazards
Identify, reduce risk of, prepare for, resist, and respond to shocks and stressors, prioritizing those that represent the greatest risks.
2. Human-centered
Position the well-being of individuals, families, communities, and society at the center of resilience goals, taking into consideration the needs of all community members.
3. Equitable and just
Pursue solutions that address, and do not exacerbate, disparities between and within communities. Ensure strategies respond to the needs of underserved and marginalized communities that have historically borne the disproportionate burden of impacts and costs incurred through decisions made by both public and private actors.
4. Adaptive
Maintain awareness of and a willingness to apply and implement innovative thinking, tools, and methods to quickly realign or take advantage of evolving circumstances.
5. Collaborative
Seek input that engages and empowers the public, private, academic, and non-profit sectors and all community members; reflects a commitment to collective deliberation; and utilizes transparent processes, metrics, and goals for data-driven decision making.
6. Sustainable and durable
Implement solutions that serve current and future needs by considering the entire life cycle of solutions. Seek to ensure that there is continuity of technical expertise and leadership as needed.
7. Interdependent
Apply risk-informed approaches and integrated processes that account for the complexity and interdependencies of systems, prioritizing solutions and investments for the threats and hazards that pose the greatest risk and that can result in multiple benefits and enhance resilience over the long-term.
Beyond these principles, developing resilience requires collective action by all individuals, communities, and organizations. What are some best-practice strategies the NRG suggests taking? We tackle those measures as well as tips for planning for resilience in our article, Digging into FEMA’s Latest National Resilience Guidance.
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