Digging into FEMA’s National Resilience Guidance

Introduction

You’ve likely noticed that resilience has become a watch word among regulators and policymakers tasked with helping people before, during, and after disasters. As was the case with the recently released Select Committee Report on Australia’s Disaster Resilience, stakeholders are demonstrating the urgency needed in implementing interventions meant to establish and maintain national resilience amidst a deteriorating risk environment.

Such was the case in late August. That’s when FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) released the National Resilience Guidance (NRG).

Subtitled a “Collaborative Approach to Building Resilience,” the NRG seeks to facilitate a more resilient nation through communities that thrive in social, economic, environmental, and secure institutional systems.

But what does FEMA propose, specifically? In the following article, we recapitulate the main points as well as targeted measures advanced to shore up resilience at the agency and organizational levels.

What is the National Resilience Guidance (NRG)?

So, what is the NRG, exactly?

In the introductory letter from the FEMA Administrator, Deanne Criswell writes: “The NRG is an umbrella that offers a unifying vision of resilience and the principles and steps all communities and organizations in every sector and discipline can take to increase their resilience.”

Along those lines, the NRG sets out to provide “critical concepts that communities can apply to comprehensively address the risks caused by both acute shocks and chronic community stressors.”

The U.S. risk environment

Making this document so urgent is the worsening risk environment here in the U.S. Just last year, for instance, the U.S. experienced 28-billion-dollar weather and climate disasters, as tracked by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

That figure represented a new record, breaking the previous high set only in 2020 (22 events).

The NRG acknowledges the precipitous rise in these acute incidents (also called shocks). The impact of these shocks, however, have been exacerbated by long-term strains on communities. The report qualifies these strains as stressors.

Stressors, including deteriorating infrastructure, environmental degradation, extreme weather amplified by climate change, and more, worsen the impact of shocks, while also undermining the community’s ability to thrive.

How to define resilience?

What’s then needed are a series of interventions to lessen the impact of shocks and address stressors to ensure national resilience.

But how does the NRG define resilience?

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.

Who should read the NRG?

Given the themes tackled, it would be natural to assume that the NRG is only intended for an emergency and disaster management audience.

That’s not the case, though.

As noted, the NRG is not aimed solely at the emergency management community or government or any other particular type of organization or community.

Instead, the framers intend the NRG to establish a common understanding about resilience and drive collective action.

Hence, the document is intended to help all individuals, communities, and organizations understand the nation’s vision for resilience, the key principles that must be applied to strengthen resilience, and the players and systems that contribute to resilience.

Seven principles to strengthen resilience

What then are those principles to strengthen resilience?

According to the NRG, the following seven principles set the foundation for creating 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.

Strategies for strengthening resilience

Beyond principles, developing resilience requires collective action by all individuals, communities, and organizations.

What are some strategies those actors should take? The NRG recommends the following:

Understand shocks and stressors

Understanding shocks, stressors, and the connection between them is a basic step for building resilience. Developing this understanding includes the following activities:

• • Identifying shocks
  • Analyzing risk, vulnerability, and potential consequences
  • Evaluating chronic stressors
  • Assessing the interactions between shocks and stressors

Factor resilience considerations into existing activities

Several meaningful steps can be taken to strengthen resilience without requiring a dedicated resilience initiative or extensive funding. It starts with building on what already exists. Any project or activity can be used to help strengthen resilience by factoring in resilience concepts and principles.

Incorporate resilience principles into activities and decision-making

Resilience principles provide one approach for incorporating resilience considerations into existing activities and decision-making, including the identification of resilience evaluation and prioritization criteria.

Planning for resilience: Three important factors to consider

The rubber hits the road, however, when it comes to planning for resilience.

As the NRG states, resilience planning can take a variety of paths, each with its own pros and cons as shown in the following table.

These approaches are not mutually exclusive and may intersect and merge over time.

Three important considerations for resilience planning include:

1. Create a stand-alone plan focused on resilience

2. Add resilience as a core component of an existing plan

3. Integrate resilience into all community plans

Selecting a resilience planning approach

Given those considerations, how to actually approach resilience planning? Here, the NRG recommends asking the following questions when selecting a resilience planning approach:

• What is the current understanding of future conditions, shocks, and stressors, and how has this been integrated into previous plans?
• What resources are available to devote to resilience planning?
• What datasets or ongoing data collection initiatives are available to inform the planning process and measure outcomes?
• What other policies and plans will be developed or updated, including those at other levels of government, and what is the timing of those efforts? Are there gaps or conflicting goals in current plans that should be addressed?
• Who has been engaged in previous planning processes and how does that compare to who should be included in resilience planning?

International examples of national resilience

As mentioned, the resilience conversation is global. Countries and regions around the world are facing many of the same risk factors as the U.S., and their policymakers are responding in kind.

In early August, a Senate committee examining Australia’s disaster resilience released its long-awaited report to Parliament, proffering ten recommendations on such wide-ranging matters as funding arrangements, mental health supports, emergency volunteering models, and the need to establish a national asset register.

A recommendation that emerged from the local resilience community was the need to mobilize volunteers and match them up with the work that needs to be done. Some of this work can be undertaken by emergency management software:

“…there is no good, integrated data system in Australia where those jobs are fed into a single system and the volunteers are fed into another system and you can marry the two up. The data is just all over the place. And that can potentially keep the ADF in the field for longer than they necessarily need to be.”

Nor was this the only mention of digital technology to enhance disaster resilience. Australian report authors specifically noted the importance of such technologies to enhance disaster communication and response capabilities in disaster-prone areas.

In close, the U.S., like the rest of the world, is experiencing a rise in consecutive, concurrent, and compounding crises, with forecasts of worse to come.

As a result, FEMA has proposed a series of recommendations to ensure the country remains disaster resilient well into the next century. In this article, we’ve discussed these recommendations.

The main takeaway, though, is the continued need to prioritize proactive resilience over reactive response.

What can individual organizations do to prioritize resilience, though? Not mentioned in the report, but we recommend investments in platforms like Noggin, which provide a comprehensive and holistic approach to resilience, facilitate crucial collaboration and coordination, unlock critical insights, keeps stakeholders informed, and streamline essential workflows for planning and response.

But don’t just take our word for it. Request a demonstration to see Noggin in action for yourself.