Roundtable: Measuring Resilience in Recent Federal Environment Emergency Program Initiatives
(Natural Resource Security, Energy and Environmental Policy)

Saturday, November 5, 2016: 10:15 AM-11:45 AM
Dupont (Washington Hilton)

*Names in bold indicate Presenter

Roundtable Organizers:  Carlos Eduardo Martin, Urban Institute
Moderators:  Carlos Eduardo Martin, Urban Institute
Speakers:  Lauren Augustine Alexander, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Erin Mack Ashley, Atkins Global, Eric Burnstein, Urban Institute and Christopher J. Narducci, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

This roundtable will address the latest challenge for federal environmental and emergency management programs: the measurement of regional or city-level "resilience." Often used to describe a wide-range of activities, federal funding sources, and expected outcomes, the term has come to involve three overlapping policy areas: 1) improvements in responses to shocks, typically physical ones like natural disasters or environmental crises; 2) improvements in the underlying social and economic conditions that inhibit those responses, such as spatial segregation or income inequality; and 3) changes in governance structures and public planning and procurement processes that enable both of these. In short, “resilience” intervention is often a catch-all for comprehensive change. This roundtable assembles four different stakeholders working in the areas of community resilience building as they are defined by national programs in the U.S., including: the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rebuild by Design and National Disaster Resilience Competition; the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Community Resilience Program; and the National Academy of Science’s Resilient America Roundtable. Each speaker is involved in measurement exercises related to her/his particular resilience intervention, as well either implementing or evaluating resilience-related programs. The goals of the roundtable are to: 1) present and compare current efforts to measure resilience in national programs; and 2) discuss the role of place-based resilience-building efforts as a matter of national public policy.