The Equitable Resilience Builder Tool: Inclusive Planning for Disasters and Climate Change
Citation:
MATSLER, M. The Equitable Resilience Builder Tool: Inclusive Planning for Disasters and Climate Change. Resiliency Workshop: Tools, Case Studies, and Resources to Support Local Efforts, Washington, DC, April 24 - 25, 2024.
Impact/Purpose:
The Equitable Resilience Builder is a resource to help communities enhance their resilience to disasters, homeland security incidents, and climate change in ways that center equity and inclusion. The product is a downloadable application. It contains a set of activities for identifying key hazards and social vulnerabilities in a community; inclusively assessing the resilience of a community's social, built, and natural environment systems; and prioritizing actions for strengthening resilience in an equitable way. It is intended for use by local resilience planners to help them listen to community members, engage them in resilience planning, and foster the networks and relationships that underlie community resilience.
Description:
The Equitable Resilience Builder (ERB) is a newly released tool to support community resilience planning. ERB is a downloadable application that supports communities in strengthening resilience to disasters and climate change. It walks a core team of users through a guided process to engage community members in resilience planning to generate solutions that address equity. State, Tribal, territorial, county, or municipal government agencies in environment, public health, emergency management, public works, or land use might be interested in using ERB. The core team uses it to plan collaborative workshops to assess hazards, vulnerability, and resilience, and to identify actions to strengthen community resilience in ways that address the needs of those made vulnerable by social and environmental inequalities. For example, a county could use it to help update their hazard mitigation plan to include more information on the social networks created as part of the COVID-19 pandemic and how different neighborhoods experience flooding during heavy rains. In this presentation, the audience will be introduced to the tool and shown how to use it.