Because of this role of resources in the coping process, a threat of resource loss, their actual loss, or a lack of resource gain after investment of resources lead to psychological distress. According to the Conservation of Resources theory (COR), when confronted with an event threatening to deplete one’s resources (e.g. job loss), people try to offset such losses by drawing on available resources in their environment (e.g. savings, social networks) (Hobfoll, 1989, 2002). These findings provide strong evidence that community recovery is tied to the wider social context. Second, this approach fails to identify potential differences between resilience and recovery processes in different communities.
In places where it’s really clean, it’s a lot easier to defend than places where people have built up in the canyons in a mosaic of wildland and houses. You can’t get rid of a WUI; there is always an interface between where you have people and where the wildlands are. After a disaster, most of the time we’re learning what we already knew, but we’re now seeing it play out.
A Roadmap for Building Community Resilience
Emergency response and disaster systems learn by experience and modify plans and procedures with what is learned. As Kettl (196) emphasized, every disaster is different, and we cannot succeed in managing new disasters solely by preparing for what we have seen in the past. However, it is disappointing that this is one of the few mentions of “health” in the after-action report and “stress” is not mentioned at al. A commitment to more inclusiveness was reflected in the agency’s after-action report (17) where the agency referred to the significant contributions that “brave residents,” NGOs, the private sector, and others made, along with state and local emergency responders and federal workers to the overall disaster response in both Texas and Puerto Rico. Disaster response plans had been improved, staff were better prepared with pre-positioned resources, and the agency was much more willing to accept help from non-federal partners including non-governmental organizations (e.g., the Red Cross), private business and others as well as state and local government entities (12). As a result, governmental response to Hurricane Sandy in 2011 was noticeably improved e.g., see (198)17, (199), but many health-related problems persisted.
- Yet, their ability to adapt and rebuild is shaped by many of the same factors that influence individual resilience—genes, cognition, and traits—as well as their access to external resources.
- Despite the role of resilience as a potential mediator between risk factors and mental health outcomes, few studies have examined the possible mediating relationship of resilience to mitigate against adverse mental health outcomes following exposure to disaster events (23).
- Further exploration of these individual elements may lead to a greater understanding of what community resilience is and how it can be measured and enhanced.
- Stress–reaction models focus on the distress-specific psychological outcomes of experiencing a disaster, particularly depression, anxiety, and PTSD 23,24,47,48.
Table 3.
In addition to stimulating local, state and national economies by creating new jobs, natural infrastructure plays an important role in safeguarding communities by reducing the overall impact of hurricanes—minimizing the extent of post-disaster cost and recovery efforts. Yet, for too long, federal disaster response has prioritized writing checks after a disaster, rather than reducing the 2025 US Tornadoes and Severe Storms relief risk of harm before disasters strike. Our national approach to disasters is in need of improvement, but to meet the scale of the challenge, we need to think more systematically, more strategically, and, yes, more naturally about disaster response and risk reduction.
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The very act of defining a resilience metric, and the discussions that ensue about its structure, helps a community to clarify and formalize what it means by the concept of resilience, thereby raising the quality of debate. Furthermore, the nation lacks a national repository for all-hazard event and loss data, compromising the ability of communities to make informed decisions about where and how to prioritize their resilience investments. The geographic patterns of disaster losses—e.g., human fatalities, property losses, and crop losses—illustrate where the impacts are the greatest, what challenges exist in responding to and recovering from disasters, and what factors drive exposure and vulnerability to hazards and disasters. The need to make appropriate resilience investments to prepare and plan for hazards and risks.