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Building Equitable Resilience: EPA research and tools for community planning (NCASC)
Citation:
Maxwell, K., E. Eisenhauer, B. Kiessling, S. Julius, M. Fry, Annie Matsler, M. Shacklette, L. Oliver, I. Reilly, S. Henson, AND R. Nee. Building Equitable Resilience: EPA research and tools for community planning (NCASC). National Climate Adaptation Science Center, Washington, DC, March 28, 2024.
Impact/Purpose:
Increasing and inequitable impacts from climate change and other hazards are a growing concern for communities and a focus of planning efforts. This research, conducted through case studies with several U.S. communities, explores and develops ways to center equity in resilience planning through participatory processes. The findings support resilience planning efforts at local scales through the development of the Equitable Resilience Builder tool which offers guidance and activities for engaging community members in planning. The research may be of interest to planning practitioners, community based organizations and state and federal agency staff who support community resilience efforts.
Description:
As the risks of climate change impacts become more apparent and more severe, communities need ways to plan, adapt, and transform in order to increase resilience. Disasters cause widely disparate impacts on communities and populations with differential vulnerability, making necessary community resilience planning that explicitly addresses equity. Local resilience planning is increasingly using tools and methods for analyzing vulnerability such as social vulnerability indices, and while such tools can increase consideration of equity there are well known inadequacies, including significant data gaps for many population groups and inability to account for underlying social systems that cause vulnerability. A team of social and biophysical scientists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Research and Development has developed the Equitable Resilience Builder to support community level practitioners in centering equity in resilience planning through engagement that is inclusive, transparent, and accountable and that builds relationships and strengthens capacity. The interactive application guides practitioners in using techniques such as storytelling, participatory mapping, indicator assessment, action planning and implementation, with emphasis on equitable participation and focus on equity issues throughout. The application was developed through Human Centered Design methods, iteratively incorporating end-user input from municipal, county, and Tribal government agencies and non-profit organizations. A prototype was tested through case studies with three different communities in EPA Regions 2, 4 and 5, and lessons learned were incorporated into the final application design. Findings from the case studies include: the value and outcomes from bringing together diverse community members, officials and organizational representatives, the drawbacks of social vulnerability framing and the importance of facilitation for encouraging productive discussions about equity, the challenges communities face in determining hazard risk, the need to understand and address individual and community trauma, and that sustainability of engagement and planning initiatives is heavily dependent on availability of resources. The findings support an understanding of resilience that is inherently relational and holistic, in which environmental hazards and other inequities are intertwined. Building and strengthening networks and relationships and the flows of resources and information through them helps communities better prepare for and respond to environmental, social, economic, or health related crises.