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This document highlights areas of potential community resilience improvements, especially those that relate to clean energy deployment for communities and municipalities. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) defines resilience as "a system's ability to anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to changing conditions and withstand, respond to, and recover rapidly from disruptions through sustainable, adaptable, and holistic planning and technical solutions." This document introduces 10 categories of resilience-enhancing projects at a high level, intended for community members and decision-makers new to the topic to build their understanding of which solutions fit their community best. These categories focus primarily on community-scale measures and different options may be available at larger scales. Full implementation of the measures described here requires in-depth, site-specific considerations that go beyond the scope of this document.
"Many cities and municipalities lack the resources to prepare for and respond to threats like extreme weather, economic volatility, and aging infrastructure. Energy systems are particularly vulnerable because of their interactions with other systems that allow communities to function and thrive, e.g., transportation, housing, and business activity. This report discusses ways in which energy efficiency can increase the resilience of energy systems and the communities they serve. It reviews the resilience-related benefits of efficiency measures, discusses the incorporation of efficiency into resilience planning, and presents four case studies showing how local governments and utilities can leverage energy efficiency to increase the resilience of their communities. Although much potential remains untapped, the report finds that energy efficiency is a clear pathway toward making communities and their residents stronger, safer, and more resilient"--Publisher's description (viewed October 6, 2015).
Over 90 percent of US power generation comes from large, centralized, highly polluting, nonrenewable sources of energy. It is delivered through long, brittle transmission lines, and then is squandered through inefficiency and waste. But it doesn't have to be that way. Communities can indeed produce their own local, renewable energy. Power from the People explores how homeowners, co-ops, nonprofit institutions, governments, and businesses are putting power in the hands of local communities through distributed energy programs and energy-efficiency measures. Using examples from around the nation - and occasionally from around the world - Greg Pahl explains how to plan, organize, finance, and launch community-scale energy projects that harvest energy from sun, wind, water, and earth. He also explains why community power is a necessary step on the path to energy security and community resilience - particularly as we face peak oil, cope with climate change, and address the need to transition to a more sustainable future. This book - the second in the Chelsea Green Publishing Company and Post Carbon Institute's Community Resilience Series - also profiles numerous communitywide initiatives that can be replicated elsewhere.
While urban settlements are the drivers of the global economy and centres of learning, culture, and innovation and nations rely on competitive dynamic regions for their economic, social, and environmental objectives, urban centres and regions face a myriad of challenges that impact the ways in which people live and work, create wealth, and interact and connect with places. Rapid urbanisation is resulting in urban sprawl, rising emissions, urban poverty and high unemployment rates, housing affordability issues, lack of urban investment, low urban financial and governance capacities, rising inequality and urban crimes, environmental degradation, increasing vulnerability to natural disasters and so forth. At the regional level, low employment, low wage growth, scarce financial resources, climate change, waste and pollution, and rising urban peri-urban competition etc. are impacting the ability of regions to meet socio-economic development goals while protecting biodiversity. The response to these challenges has typically been the application of inadequate or piecemeal solutions, often as a result of fragmented decision-making and competing priorities, with numerous economic, environmental, and social consequences. In response, there is a growing movement towards viewing cities and regions as complex and sociotechnical in nature with people and communities interacting with one another and with objects, such as roads, buildings, transport links etc., within a range of urban and regional settings or contexts. This comprehensive MRW will provide readers with expert interdisciplinary knowledge on how urban centres and regions in locations of varying climates, lifestyles, income levels, and stages development are creating synergies and reducing trade-offs in the development of resilient, resource-efficient, environmentally friendly, liveable, socially equitable, integrated, and technology-enabled centres and regions.
National and global efforts have failed to stop climate change, transition from fossil fuels, and reduce inequality. We must now confront these and other increasingly complex problems by building resilience at the community level. The Community Resilience Reader combines a fresh look at the challenges humanity faces in the 21st century, the essential tools of resilience science, and the wisdom of activists, scholars, and analysts working on the ground to present a new vision for creating resilience. It shows that resilience is a process, not a goal; how it requires learning to adapt but also preparing to transform; and that it starts and ends with the people living in a community. From Post Carbon Institute, the producers of the award-winning The Post Carbon Reader, The Community Resilience Reader is a valuable resource for community leaders, college students, and concerned citizens.
This book explores how homeowners, co-ops, nonprofit institutions, and other entities are putting power in the hands of local communities through distributed energy programs and energy-efficiency measures. Using examples from around the nation, Pahl explains how to plan and launch community-scale energy projects to harvest energy.
The 2012 National Research Council report, Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative, identified the development and use of resilience measures as critical to building resilient communities. Although many kinds of resilience measures and measuring tools have and continue to be developed, very few communities consistently use them as part of their planning or resilience building efforts. Since federal or top-down programs to build resilience often yield mixed results, bottom-up approaches are needed, but are often difficult for communities to implement alone. A major challenge for many communities in developing their own approaches to resilience measures is identifying a starting point and defining the process. Other challenges include lack of political will due to competing priorities and limited resources, finite time and staff to devote to developing resilience measures, lack of data availability and/or inadequate data sharing among community stakeholders, and a limited understanding of hazards and/or risks. Building on existing work, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine organized a workshop in July 2015 to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and information about ways to advance the development and implementation of resilience measures by and within diverse communities. Participants worked to gain a better understanding of the challenges these communities face in the pursuit of resilience and determine whether the approach used during this workshop can help guide communities in their efforts to build their own measures of resilience. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.
The threats to the electricity grid are on the rise at the same time as society is increasing its dependence on electricity for every aspect of our personal, social, and economic lives. We are accelerating that dependence – looking to the electrification of transportation and buildings as a way to stem the threats of climate change. Those threats have now arrived (in the form of more extreme weather, droughts, and wildfire) and they are joined by increasing threats from an aging grid and cyberattacks. The grid we rely on is experiencing increasingly vulnerable external forces. We aren’t helpless. Effective planning around these threats can dramatically reduce the havoc they engender on the electric grid. At every level, from a single building, to a city, to the electric grid and the federal government, steps can be taken to improve our resilience to threats to the electricity system. When those efforts are coordinated, their benefits multiply. This book aims to provide every level of decision-maker with tools and best practices for reducing the risk of and from electricity loss. It is written in non-technical language, with a focus on actionable, easily implemented steps.
In the devastation that follows a major disaster, there is a need for multiple sectors to unite and devote new resources to support the rebuilding of infrastructure, the provision of health and social services, the restoration of care delivery systems, and other critical recovery needs. In some cases, billions of dollars from public, private and charitable sources are invested to help communities recover. National rhetoric often characterizes these efforts as a "return to normal." But for many American communities, pre-disaster conditions are far from optimal. Large segments of the U.S. population suffer from preventable health problems, experience inequitable access to services, and rely on overburdened health systems. A return to pre-event conditions in such cases may be short-sighted given the high costs - both economic and social - of poor health. Instead, it is important to understand that the disaster recovery process offers a series of unique and valuable opportunities to improve on the status quo. Capitalizing on these opportunities can advance the long-term health, resilience, and sustainability of communities - thereby better preparing them for future challenges. Healthy, Resilient, and Sustainable Communities After Disasters identifies and recommends recovery practices and novel programs most likely to impact overall community public health and contribute to resiliency for future incidents. This book makes the case that disaster recovery should be guided by a healthy community vision, where health considerations are integrated into all aspects of recovery planning before and after a disaster, and funding streams are leveraged in a coordinated manner and applied to health improvement priorities in order to meet human recovery needs and create healthy built and natural environments. The conceptual framework presented in Healthy, Resilient, and Sustainable Communities After Disasters lays the groundwork to achieve this goal and provides operational guidance for multiple sectors involved in community planning and disaster recovery. Healthy, Resilient, and Sustainable Communities After Disasters calls for actions at multiple levels to facilitate recovery strategies that optimize community health. With a shared healthy community vision, strategic planning that prioritizes health, and coordinated implementation, disaster recovery can result in a communities that are healthier, more livable places for current and future generations to grow and thrive - communities that are better prepared for future adversities.
This paper deals with the interconnection of community resilience and various aspects of energy supply and consumption--what we call local energy resilience. We discuss nine dimensions of local energy resilience (for example, transportation connectivity and thermal performance of buildings) and provide indicators for each of them. Decision makers can use these concepts to set goals, inform plans, and develop policies to increase the energy resilience of their communities.