Disruption of business operations from natural hazards creates immediate hardship in economic terms for individuals who may lose their jobs, business organizations that may lose employees, property, and market functions, and communities that would experience a compounding loss of tax revenue and added demands for public services.  Under current public policies and procedures that assume voluntary action for disaster preparedness, the business sector is less likely to have taken measures to assure continuity of operations and protection of their personnel, property, and business processes.  Creating a resilient business sector that can adapt, change, and realign its resources and operations to manage risk of recurring hazards is essential for minimizing losses from disaster.  We propose that building resilience is an iterative, causal process that necessarily needs to be fitted to the geographic, social, economic, and technical characteristics of any community.  To explore this process, we examine the impact of Superstorm Sandy on the businesses – employers and employees – that were affected in the coastal communities of New York and New Jersey.

Framing the problem of disaster resilience as one that is generated by interacting physical, technical, organizational, social, and cultural systems requires an interdisciplinary perspective. Defining disaster resilience as the product of an interacting ‘complex adaptive system of systems’ offers an innovative approach to modeling the emergence of this capacity in communities exposed to risk.  People learn, organizations learn, and systems of organizations learn to adapt their behavior to reduce risk, if investment is made in a socio-technical-cultural infrastructure to facilitate access to valid information regarding risk, and accurate, timely feedback regarding the consequences of actions taken.  Identifying the threshold points of recognition of, adaptation to, and redesign for, risk enables the system of interacting organizations to build the skills and resources needed for resilience.

Integrating assessment of the spatial characteristics of risk, vulnerability, cost, and ability to pay into the design of policies and practice to reduce disaster risk is essential to measuring resilience in communities exposed to recurring hazards.  Given the changing context in which hazards occur, this task builds on the concept of “hazard of place”.  It extends assessment to include not only geolocation of hazards, probability of occurrence, and vulnerability of population at risk, but also the cost of mitigation and preparedness measures, estimated reduction in losses achieved from measures taken, and timeliness and cost of recovery in communities afflicted by disaster events. This analysis creates a baseline of performance before an extreme event, against which decisions made during response operations can measure change in the impact of the event on the community. Decisions made in response operations shape needs for recovery and influence the order and timing of recovery strategies. Capturing this decision process and tracking dependencies from preparedness to response to recovery reveals the degree of resilience that the community is able to achieve in an actual event. We propose a mixed methods approach, combining Rapid Ethnographic Assessment methods with expert interviews to generate rule-based computational models.