Resilience Institute 2017- 2020 Accomplishments & Highlights
Executive Summary 04 Convergence Resilience Research 06 Case Study: Applying I-RES in New Orleans Case Study: Economic Development in the State of Maine 10 Case Study: Pandemic Recovery and Economic Development in Connecticut To learn more about the Global Resilience Insitute, visit globalresilience.northeastern.edu 09 Research Area 1: Advancing Knowledge and Methods This report is representative of information through November 12, 2020. 08 13 Research Area 2: Growing More Resilient Communities 14 Research Area 3: Transforming Policy and Governance 15 Case Study: Applying I-RES for Economic Recovery in New England 16 Research Area 4: Overcoming Barriers to Investing in Resilience 18 Research Area 5: Creating Resilience Critical Infrastructure 19 Research Area 6: Cyber Systems 21 Collaborative Ecosystem 24 Catalyzing Convergence Resilience Research at Northeastern University 25 External Collaborations 31 Contact Us 37
Summary The Global Resilience Institute (GRI) was created as a university-wide initiative, underwritten by an internal investment approved by Northeastern’s Board of Trustees. With GRI's launch in April 2017, Northeastern University became the world’s first major university to approach resilience as a grand challenge.1 In just over three years, GRI has delivered on what it set out to do - and more.A1 The foundational efforts are now complete and GRI's significant contributions in response to the COVID-19 emergency has positioned Northeastern to become the global highereducation leader in convergence research that advances the development of resilient communities and systems that can thrive in our turbulent and fragile times. Northeastern University's investment in GRI is paying off: GRI will continue to build on the work it has been undertaking in five areas: DIRECTLY WORKING WITH COMMUNITIES AND ENTERPRISES to assess their current level of resilience across multiple social, physical and economic indicators. GRI CONTINUES TO BUILD AN ACTIVE AND GROWING COLLABORATIVE COMMUNITY OF RESEARCHERS AND EDUCATORS ACROSS NORTHEASTERN. In 2017 GRI reached out to faculty in all 9 colleges and seeded funding for resilience transdisciplinary projects which catalyzed and supported their resilience-related research. GRI also identified and facilitated the engagement of a diverse group of funding entities to support proposals for external funding. Total awards for GRI and this program have resulted in over $24M in funding to the university.A2 As of July 2020, an additional $28M of Northeasterngenerated resilience research proposals are under consideration. GUIDING THE INTEGRATION OF RESILIENCE into community, state and regional economic development planning and execution to include directly supporting post-disaster recovery. DEEPENING AN UNDERSTANDING OF AND DEVELOPING MITIGATION STRATEGIES for managing the risk of cascading failures associated with complex interdependent critical infrastructure sectors, including from cyber-threats. GRI’S TRANSDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH IS HAVING REAL SOCIETAL IMPACT. Nicholas Lehmann, Dean, School of Journalism at Columbia University has identified the pursuit of grand challenges as a “new movement” for universities in an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education.2 In Lehmann’s words, what is noteworthy about these initiatives is that “their purpose is to direct scholarly knowledge outside the university in the hope of making a difference in the here and now.” Looking ahead, GRI will continue to play a leadership role as a part of a unique class of “grand challenge” initiatives currently underway at top-tier universities. By so doing, GRI is enhancing Northeastern’s ability to attract new capabilities and external funding to its research enterprises in ways that have a timely and significant societal impact. GRI has been directly supporting FEMA and all six New England states in guiding their ongoing recovery efforts from the COVID-19 emergency. This work is incorporating equity, sustainability, and resilience into recovery planning and actions by leveraging the Integrated Resilience Enhancement Solution (I-RES) methodology that GRI piloted in the City of New Orleans and has deployed to the State of Maine. GRI HAS ENHANCED NORTHEASTERN’S GLOBAL PROFILE AND REPUTATION by launching and managing a global membership network, the Global Resilience Research Network (GRRN), comprised of 37 universities and research institutes in 22 countries to support convergent resilience research worldwide.A3 CONDUCTING POST-DISASTER RESILIENCE ASSESSMENTS to inform the development of practical resilience best-practices. The common link of all these efforts is putting into practice what the former NSF Engineering Science Center Program Director and current GRI Distinguished Senior Fellow, Dr. Vilas Mujumdar, identifies as the essential attributes of successful convergence research: • GRI CONTINUES TO GROW THE NEXT GENERATION OF RESILIENCE RESEARCHERS 4 CONTRIBUTING TO RESILIENCE EDUCATION AND STORY-TELLING i.e., formulating and conveying the resilience curricula and narratives that educate and inspire. AND LEADERS by mentoring junior faculty and involving over 200 students in contributing directly to GRI’s mission. The real-world demand for research and education that informs efforts to build resilience at multiple levels is rapidly growing, validating the timeliness of Northeastern’s decision to launch GRI in 2017. As the COVID-19 emergency has confirmed, bolstering resilience is one of the most critical imperatives of our time. Exhibits diversity and a culture of inclusion for all participants and their mutual benefit • GRI’s Founding Director, Professor Stephen Flynn, has provided the thought leadership that has defined the knowledge and understanding landscape for overcoming the barriers to societal resilience. Achieving meaningful outcomes requires vibrant, diverse, inclusive networks that can innovate across jurisdictional and disciplinary boundaries and involve both the public and private sectors. This lies at the heart of Northeastern’s 2025 Strategic Plan and it is why GRI has been investing in forging deep partnerships with universities, communities, corporations, and governments around the world.3 Most importantly, these efforts are immediately relevant to vulnerable communities who urgently need practical applications and solutions that position them to not just survive, but thrive in these turbulent times. Purposeful team formation • GRI has been working to compress the time that it typically takes to translate research into widespread practice. We have been actively building an ecosystem and deploying it in the face of real-world challenges so as to accelerate the cycle between applied research and common use. To develop and deploy timely solutions, researchers must work closely with policymakers, industry leaders, and social influencers. For these solutions to be widely adopted there must be meaningful market-based and/ or regulatory incentives. This requires an extraordinary degree of engagement and collaboration that universities like Northeastern are in a unique position to undertake and lead. The deep integration of knowledge, tools, and ways of thinking • COVID-19 is the latest and most dramatic instance of the world’s growing exposure to serious disruptions and shocks that makes advancing resilience an urgent necessity. Climate change, cyberthreats, terrorism, artificial intelligence, rapid urbanization, and rising social inequities are generating risks that defy conventional approaches. But it often takes many years, even decades, before proven solutions discovered in academia end up in common use. Supports an expected strong societal impact 5
Resilience Research: The Elements of Building Societal Resilience Advancing knowledge, methods, and tools which increase fundamental knowledge and understanding of resilience Provides Real Social Impact Helping people, organizations, and communities apply innovative solutions Advancing resilience in design, engineering, and operation of critical infrastructures Before GRI was launched, resilience research was siloed within academic disciplines. To build resilient communities and systems, what has been urgently needed is an institute dedicated to convergence research. 06 Embedding resilience in policy and governance Overcoming barriers to investing in resilience “ The abiding strategy of our parents’ generation was containment of communism in order to be free. THE ABIDING STRATEGY OF OUR GENERATION HAS TO BE RESILIENCE. We will only be free to live the lives we want if we make our cities, country and planet more resilient. - Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times 4 GRI has successfully put in place the foundational ecosystem, knowledge framework, and interdisciplinary solutions to tackle resilience as a grand challenge. The genesis of the Global Resilience Institute can be traced to a decade of policy discussions and decisions for which GRI’s Founding Director, Professor Stephen Flynn, has played a central role. Resilience – the ability to successfully anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to periodic shocks as well as emerging major disruptions – has become widely accepted as a national security, public policy and economic imperative. The federal government has issued executive orders and national strategy documents directing that resilience be an elemental consideration in safeguarding critical infrastructure, undertaking economic development, and conducting homeland security, emergency management, and disaster recovery. Governors, mayors, and major corporations are appointing Chief Resilience Officers. Humanitarian aid organizations such as Oxfam, Red Cross, and UNICEF are incorporating a focus on resilience into their programs.5 International Development Organizations such as the World Bank and the InterAmerican Development Bank are awarding billions of dollars in grants, globally, to strengthen resilience.6 The mobilization of public and private efforts to respond to the resilience imperative has not been met with a similar effort in academia where most resilience research has been done within silos of academic disciplines. Engineers have been experimenting with new designs, network scientists are creating models, ecologists are studying natural systems, economists are devising metrics, and psychologists are investigating behavior. But communities, companies, and governments who are facing the growing array of risks associated with disasters and other major disruptions have found this segmented knowledge and expertise to be of limited practical use. What has proved to be especially daunting is to anticipate how cascading failures will perturbate across increasingly hyperconnected systems as the COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated. It is this latter challenge that animates the need to shift to a resilience-centric paradigm. First, this requires developing a deeper understanding of the complex systems that provide viable functions, and next, evaluating how sudden shocks or slow-moving disruptions will affect those interdependent systems. The overarching goal is to identify actions that can mitigate cascading failures regardless of the source of the disruption. When shocks do occur, the focus must be on prioritizing the steps that lead to the restoration of critical functions. Once the crisis passes, then the important work begins of adapting systems so they will perform better when future shocks occur. Recognizing these challenges is why in 2017, with the approval of Northeastern’s President and Board of Trustees, GRI was established as a university-wide institute that could facilitate the creation of interdisciplinary research teams that integrate their expertise and engage in mutual learning to the benefit of the public and private sectors. In order to truly impact the grand challenge of societal resilience, GRI has focused its efforts where research was both informed and immediately relevant to practical application and solution. The following sections are examples of the integrated strategy that GRI is using to align fieldwork and analysis with practical application to enable the implementation of resilience enhancing initiatives. 7
Bringing Research to Practice: Applying I-RES in New Orleans Turning resilience research into practice is central to GRI's mission of bolstering societal resilience. GRI’s work with the City of New Orleans offers a compelling example of the impact which GRI’s research can have in a city renowned for struggle and triumph in advancing its own societal resilience. “ GRI’S CUTTING EDGE RESEARCH, USING THEIR UNIQUE RESILIENCE ENHANCEMENT SYSTEM, HAS HIGHLIGHTED THE INVESTMENT LANDSCAPE in New Orleans East, Algiers and the Lower Ninth Ward, and has presented a path forward for developing conditions to foster sustained economic growth and transformational change. GRI’s assessment of these census tracts has shaped the way we look at our Opportunity Zones and illuminated the potential to leverage Qualified Opportunity Zones to attract long term, private capital investments that, when coupled with public funding and policy incentives, will foster a brighter and more resilient New Orleans.” – John Pourciau, Chief of Staff to New Orleans’ Mayor LaToya Cantrell 88 Cross-sector Engagement – The Bedrock of Resilience Building In February of 2019, the Global Resilience Institute partnered with a Tiger Team of senior personnel from the City of New Orleans, assembled by Mayor LaToya Cantrell, to apply GRI’s Integrated Resilience Enhancement Solution (I-RES) to three disadvantaged communities. Using the I-RES methodology, a process which combines quantitative data, qualitative information, and a robust community engagement process, GRI worked with the city to develop resilience baselines of the communities and paths forward for achieving resilience-based economic development. GRI is unique among other institutes which have studied New Orleans’ resilience, in that it directly engaged stakeholders from every sector – public, private, community, and academic – to understand their needs, preferences, and the functional impact that resilience has on their ability to live and work in communities. GRI engaged with over 60 stakeholders and reviewed plans from across the city to bring resilience recommendations to the people and organizations who will most directly experience them. The Functional Expression of Resilience The Global Resilience Institute’s I-RES takes a functional approach to evaluating the needs and strengths of a community as they pertain to resilience-building. People and organizations choose to live in communities because they receive benefits and services by locating in a chosen place with a functioning government, cultural attractiveness, and robust social and economic activity. In New Orleans GRI successfully examined how the resilience of the three neighborhood communities impacted the people who live there, observing their physical, social, and economic systems. Through this research, GRI not only developed baseline assessments of their current states, but also how failures could cascade across systems in the face of inevitable shocks and stresses. Determining a path forward, however, requires careful consideration about how the strengths of the community can be aligned to positively change its trajectory. The I-RES approach yielded recommendations for transformative change in New Orleans and resulted in a sustained partnership and joint application for Economic Development Administration funding. A New Way Forward for Resilience Research The success of I-RES in New Orleans has excited interest in other communities around the country and abroad. In addition to the tangible benefits for the New Orleans, the importance of resiliencebased development strategies has paved the way for research and funding from diverse sources. Building resilience is an imperative that will animate projects for other cities, private enterprises, economic developers, emergency managers, and non-profits. The I-RES brings resilience from the emergency management realm from which it has traditionally been researched, into the physical, economic, and social disciplines that must be engaged to create sustainable solutions. The I-RES methodology illuminates a path forward towards addressing complex challenges in ways that can be acted upon by local leaders and others who are on the frontlines of making communities more resilient so that people can live and thrive in sustainable and equitable ways. Bringing Research to Practice: Economic Development in the State of Maine A Rapid Understanding of Communities' Resilience Status The Global Resilience Institute’s I-RES allows for rapid assessments of a community’s current state of resilience, using quantitative indicators and qualitative information. In Maine where small businesses play a dominant role in the economy, GRI worked with the state’s Office of Economic and Community Development to tailor the application of the I-RES approach for three representative communities across the state. This approach, undertaken with funding support from the U.S. Economic Development Administration, allows GRI to rapidly undertake research that captures the complexity of individual municipalities in a way that can inform a state-wide understanding of community resilience challenges and opportunities. This adaptation of I-RES also ensures that local champions are directly involved with each step of the process so they can benefit from real-time insights gathered through data analysis and stakeholder engagement. Private Sector Engagement – Developing Achievable Strategies Comprehensive solutions to resilience-building through economic development can only be realized when there is buy-in and alignment among investors, developers, and the communities where development and investment will occur. Adapting I-RES for economic development application requires GRI to engage the private sector in ways different from traditional “publicprivate partnership.” To achieve equitable and resilient economic development, GRI’s engagement with community leaders and investors/developers facilitates their understanding of the resilience factors that will both bolster the community’s resilience and enhance its economic success. In Maine, GRI identified and engaged the people and organizations behind major projects to include repurposing an abandoned mill site and expanding aquaculture businesses. Both public and private stakeholders found that the I-RES analysis GRI provide to help them understand how they could craft successful economic development projects that simultaneously advances equity, sustainability, and resilience. Laying the Groundwork for Similar Communities Leveraging I-RES to perform assessments and provide resiliencebased economic development considerations in three rural Maine communities has the potential to serve as a model that will transform how communities and states undertake economic development. GRI is achieving this in two ways: 1) GRI partnered with the State of Maine so that all lessons learned are provided directly to planners and agencies with state-wide authority and scope. 2) After identifying considerations for meeting the needs in each community, GRI will examine trends and themes that are easily generalized to other towns. Additionally, though this project is animated by the state’s desire to attract Opportunity Zone investments, it is clear that developments in one town or Opportunity Zone will support (and be supported by) those in neighboring and interdependent communities. The outcomes of this project are validating the value of adopting a resiliencebased approach to economic advancement. The foundation of I-RES has proven adaptable to myriad research applications, including resilience-based economic development. Resilience building has proven to be critically important common ground for connecting typically disconnected community decision makers – such as emergency managers, community advocates, and economic developers – to work towards shared community goals. Based on the success of applying the I-RES in New Orleans, GRI recognized that communities across the nation could also benefit from resilience-based strategies that facilitiate the successful implementation of comprehensive economic development efforts. GRI launched a project with the State of Maine with the goal of using baseline resilience assessments of three communities to develop key considerations for economic development in the communities’ tax-advantaged, Qualified Opportunity Zones. The work in Maine demonstrates the ability for I-RES principles to inform and advance economic development in distressed rural communities. 9
Advancing Knowledge and Methods Integrated Resilience Enhancement Solution (I-RES) GRI’s Integrated Resilience Enhancement Solution (I-RES) methodology goes beyond individual case studies to provide a practical tool for objectively assessing societal resilience across the economic, social, and physical infrastructure domains. The I-RES successfully bridges academic research with real communities, governance entities, and businesses to ensure that all parties’ objectives are considered in resilience strengthening efforts. It is often difficult for busy, underresourced communities to ensure that all parts of government are coordinated in ways that best serve the interests and needs of their residents, especially their most vulnerable populations. Major Resilience Accomplishment The Integrated Resilience Enhancement Solution: Process and Procedures Guide The I-RES takes the highly complex problem of societal resilience and analyzes it through a lens of selected, proven, resilience indicators – simplifying thousands of data points into essential decision criteria that: MOVE BEYOND A STOVEPIPED, SECTORAL APPROACH to provide functional analysis of critical improvements that advance community recovery capacity, quality of life, and economic prosperity PROVIDE A FRAMEWORK for engaging governance, community and private sector to embrace a common set of resilience solutions SUPPORT STRATEGIES that provide the finances and capital for implementing resilience solutions 10 The I-RES also performs a vital convening role ensuring that communications within the society and between government and private business sector officials are open and productive. Because it organizes and opens communications among institutions both public and private, the I-RES creates new, innovative pathways to societal resilience by building on academic research, policy studies and institutional programs. The importance of the I-RES methodology towards achieving practical outcomes has been recognized with four grants awarded in 2020: two from the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA), one from FEMA Region 1, and one from the State of Connecticut. The EDA grants are for applying the I-RES to inform resilient economic development planning for the State of Maine and the City of New Orleans. In response to the COVID-19 emergency, FEMA Region 1 has sponsored GRI in working with each of the six New England States in applying its I-RES-based approach to rapidly identifying critical needs for resilient economic recovery. The State of Connecticut and two philanthropic organizations have awarded GRI a major grant to build on the FEMA effort by working with the state's five emergency management regions on establishing a resilience baseline that can inform a comprehensive economic recovery that achieves equity, sustainability, and resilience outcomes. Benefits for Research The applied research that informs and refines the I-RES methodology is deepening and accelerating the development of societal resilience at multiple levels. Its basis in principles of resilience and indicators, validated by field research involving deep stakeholder engagement, provides a detailed multidisciplinary understanding of the interdependencies associated with infrastructure systems, economic capacity and performance, and social structures. The I-RES methodology produces an actionable assessment of the resilience strengths and challenges facing a community, enterprise, or wider-region that can guide the optimal investment of resources. The ongoing field work associated with the deployment of the I-RES methodology builds strong relationships of trust with public officials, business executives, and leaders of community and social services organizations. This positions it to both rapidly generate meaningful advancements in knowledge and outcomes while simultaneously facilitating access to data and test-beds that researchers are able to use for a range of investigative efforts. SINCE 1980, THE TOTAL COST OF 258 U.S. WEATHER AND CLIMATE DISASTERS EXCEEDS $1.75 TRILLION. IN 2019, THERE WERE 14 EVENTS WITH LOSSES EXCEEDING $1 BILLION COMPARED TO 3 EVENTS IN 1980. COMMUNITIES URGENTLY NEED RESILIENCE SOLUTIONS THAT MITIGATE THESE CATASTROPHIC LOSSES.7 Societal Resilience Science and Method: Where We Are Headed Creating a resilient society even with tools like the I-RES requires the analysis of complex and diverse data that are usually understood, manipulated, and reported on by specialists. This reality can lead to misunderstandings when the evidence provided by the data is at odds with the perceptions of local practitioners and decision-makers. Academic and industry research indicates that visualization tools can simplify complex data and their relationships in ways that make them significantly more understandable to everyone. Such tools can reduce the need for experts to provide analysis as well as mitigate the risk of misperceptions when decision makers are faced with complex and diverse data. GRI is developing a data-visualization tool for public and private sector officials, economic developers and community stakeholders that allows them to better understand the interactions and interdependencies of economic, social, and infrastructure factors that affect societal resilience and prosperity. This tool will provide academics, government leaders, other societal stakeholders and decision makers the means to visualize the resilience issues impacting their communities at all scales and across all systems and domains. By leveraging its deep understanding of societal resilience and its I-RES methodology, GRI is leading the way towards tools and methods which incorporate urban informatics, digital analysis, and network theory. Specifically, GRI is developing an Economic-Visual Information System (E- VIS) tool to increase the effectiveness of resilience assessments, plans, and strategies. This will provide decision makers the capability to create resilience assessment reports and analysis that 1) paint a readily understandable picture of a community’s resilience based on known resilience indicators; 2) graphically depict the community’s resilience strengths, weaknesses, and interdependencies, ensuring that resilience planning targets real rather than perceived challenges, and 3) allow the identification of the types of public and private investments necessary to bolster the community’s ability to withstand stresses and shocks and increase their attractiveness as places of continued vitality and prosperity. Turning resilience research into practice is central to the mission of GRI and the societal resilience imperative. Resilience Governance for Infrastructure Dependencies and Interdependencies: A Practical Model for Regional Critical Infrastructure Resilience With support from the Critical Infrastructure Resilience Institute (CIRI), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence located at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, GRI developed a framework to help address the complex challenges associated with governance of interdependent infrastructure systems. Recognizing the increasing frequencies of storms like Harvey and Maria that led to billions of dollars in losses, GRI created a knowledge-based approach to help government, citizens, and the private sector take protective and responsive actions to reduce the growing risk of cascading and far-reaching failures in our hyperconnected world by addressing three key challenges:7 01 Understanding regions’ capacity and competency to prepare for and handle foreseeable risks or respond to uncertainties associated with major disasters. 02 Devising integrative approaches for advancing resilience across a region's inherently interdependent critical infrastructure systems. 03 Developing frameworks for managing organizational and governance issues on a regional scale. Working with the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA), GRI developed the approach and applied it to the Metro-Boston Region’s infrastructure that is at risk from sea-level rise and storm surge. The approach was also applied to the metro-Seattle transportation and energy infrastructure which faces catastrophic risk from a major earthquake. This effort was done in partnership with the Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER) and leveraged the scenario developed for FEMA’s 2017 Cascadia Rising national exercise.8 Major Resilience Accomplishment The model is also being integrated and further refined as part of two major multi-institutional research projects that GRI Founding Director Stephen Flynn is a Co-Principal Investigator. • Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) DoD project on “Networked Infrastructure under Compounded Extremes (NICE)"9 • National Science Foundation CRISP Type 2: Interdependent Networkbased Quantification of Infrastructure Resilience (INQUIRE)"10 11
Benefits for Research Bringing Research to Practice: GRI’s success with integrating private sector owners and operators into resilience governance planning represents an important step forward in understanding practical tools and processes needed in order to implement resilience-building solutions that address the challenges of scale (local to national) and overlapping governance structures. With over 80 percent of critical infrastructure owned and operated by private organizations, GRI is helping to generate cross-sector connections, identifying generalizable lessons, and demonstrating a nationally-applicable template for addressing resilience issues in critical infrastructure.11 Using the lessons learned, this scalable framework fills a much-needed gap by providing a way to transcend the sector silos in regional disaster planning and provide practical solutions for mitigating cascading failures across interdependent critical infrastructures. GRI’S PRACTICALLY APPLIED RESEARCH IS HELPING TO BUILD A FOUNDATION OF KNOWLEDGE, SCIENCE AND DATA FOR DURABLE RESILIENCE SOLUTIONS THAT CAN REDUCE MASSIVE GLOBAL LOSSES FROM DISASTERS THAT ARE NOW AVERAGING $350 BILLION PER YEAR.12 Disaster Resilience Improvement Lessons and Learning (DRILL) GRI created the “Disaster Resilience Improvement Lessons and Learning” (DRILL) process to provide near-real-time investigation into the impacts of significant natural or human-induced disruptions on societal resilience. Modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) rapid and highly effective assessment process for transportation disasters, GRI formulated an approach for the Post Disaster and Assessment Advisory team of subject matter experts in physical infrastructure, economic recovery, social vulnerability and other resilience indicative factors to move quickly into disaster areas, establish robust engagements with local officials and citizens, and rapidly assess the resilience implications of the disaster.13,A4 Using knowledge gained from academic literature and observations of best practices from other relevant disruptive events, the team also shares resilient recovery principles with local practitioners, validates or modifies current models of resilience indicators useful to the continuing study of societal resilience, and increases resilience knowledge base for practitioners. 12 Pandemic Recovery and Economic Development in Connecticut Catalyzing Post-Disaster Resilient Economic Recovery with a Regional Approach Following its highly successful work for FEMA to provide Rapid Needs Assessments for the six New England States, GRI was provided additional funding by the State of Connecticut to conduct a rapid assessment of the baseline recovery needs and recovery funding gaps for the State’s five economic development regions. This effort will uniquely integrate preCOVID economic development plans into a comprehensive effort to achieve long-term resilient recovery for all Connecticut residents that is more equitable and sustainable. Working directly with the Governor’s newly established Regional Recovery Steering Committees (RRSCs), GRI quickly adapted its I-RES model to undertake five economic recovery and development assessments. These in-depth assessments include an analysis of the regions’ investment landscapes which highlight factors likely to attract a mix of public and private sector investment. Major Resilience Accomplishment Post-Disaster Assessment and Advisory Team Network Operations Manual: Operational Guidance for PostDisaster Assessment and Advisory Teams, 2017.14 An operation manual to guide the process in applying a systematic approach to gathering observations, assessing resilience impacts, and identifying practices to address resilience issues contributing to disaster impact and recovery. It provides a much needed practical process to guide resilient recovery following an actual disaster as well as providing vital input to resilience research. With support of the Department of Homeland Security, the GRI team validated the DRILL methodology following the historic flooding in South Carolina and, with the city of Boston' support, analyzed the citywide disruptions from the historic 2015 snow storms. Benefits for Research GRI has demonstrated the power and effectiveness of an interdisciplinary method to advance understanding of societal resilience issues associated with disaster recovery. GRI fielded DRILL teams to test and validate the method at: 1) historic flooding in Columbia, South Carolina and the related watershed governance and management challenges; 2) snow/winter storm disruptions in the City of Boston. Working closely with researchers from local universities, government and community leaders, the teams’ application of the DRILL interdisciplinary approach and method showed how a functional approach to assessing societal resilience provides incisive analysis that rapidly identifies key challenges, helps reveal actionable, resilience-based solutions, indicates areas for needed policy change, and advances the research community’s understanding of needed improvement in models, simulations, and visualization applications for disaster planning, response and recovery, and social capital in vulnerable communities. Creating Community Capacity for Successful Resilient Economic Development Central to GRI’s mission are efforts that advance the practical capacity for communities to embed evidence-based resilience practices and methods so as to achieve their goals. In Connecticut, GRI is working with its partner, the McChrystal Group (www. mcchrystalgroup.com) to equip the RRSCs with cutting-edge tools and methods that support resilience building, teamwork, and risk-based thinking. The approach is build capacity within each of the RRSCs so that they can work with Connecticut’s 169 municipalities in a bottom-up effort that can be scaled statewide. Creating the Potential to Employ Resilient Tools and Methods in Economic Development at National Scale Creating the capability for community-based, resilience-building at national scale has been an important goal of GRI. Accomplishing this can be facilitated by the development of user-friendly toolkit specifically crafted for local community use. The Connecticut RRSC project aims to empower all 169 of Connecticut’s municipalities to create their own resilient economic development strategies. This project provides GRI with the applied research base for building and testing this much needed toolkit. While still under development, this toolkit will retain the basics of the I-RES model but in a format that allows it to be easily used by local communities at little cost and ideally without having to resort to outside assistance. Once tested, the Community I-RES model can be made available to communities throughout the United States and potentially adapted for communities overseas, thereby placing resilience assessment and action planning within the reach of all. As GRI research into the world’s evolving resilience challenges continues to grow, so too will opportunities to update and refine this toolkit. GRI's I-RES has proven to be highly adaptable at multiple scales and for a diverse ranges of disruptive events. The I-RES process supports the rapid identification and understanding of communities’ resilience issues. It facilitates the charting of economic development programs and the identification of opportunities for recovery investments that build greater resilience. The validation of GRI’s I-RES based-research in response to the COVID-19 emergency reinforces the contribution to advancing societal resilience that I-RES can potentially make if it is able to operate at scale. GRI is leveraging its work on the Connecticut Regional Recovery Steering Committees project to develop a practical toolkit that will facilitate the widespread deployment of the I-RES process. 13 13
Growing More Resilient Communities Societal resilience has its most persuasive expression in human communities — where man-made and natural systems symbiotically intertwine in a whole greater than its parts to either build strong communities or to act in conflict and counteraction, creating a weak and vulnerable community instead. GRI’s work in community resilience is central to its mission of advancing knowledge and practice of societal resilience. Our goal is to continue to advance practical solutions through greater understanding of the communal expression of societal resilience. A key success has been the completion of a series of projects which allowed us to deepen our understanding of resilience as it expresses in communities and to conduct practically focused research that helps neighborhoods, cities, regions, and states build greater societal resilience - advancing both the knowledge base and the development of practical solutions. We've accomplished this by deploying to a growing number of diverse communities, regions, and states, our adaptable and increasingly insightful Integrated Resilience Enhancement System (I-RES), our Disaster Resilience Improvement Lessons and Learning (DRILL), and our Critical Infrastructure Resilience model. Major Resilience Accomplishment Connecticut: COVID-19 Economic Recovery Support Function: Rapid Needs Assessment Maine: COVID-19 Economic Recovery Support Function: Rapid Needs Assessment Massachusetts: COVID-19 Economic Recovery Support Function: Rapid Needs Assessment New Hampshire: COVID-19 Economic Recovery Support Function: Rapid Needs Assessment Rhode Island: COVID-19 Economic Recovery Support Function: Rapid Needs Assessment Vermont: COVID-19 Economic Recovery Support Function: Rapid Needs Assessment Through reports and stakeholder workshops, GRI was able to provide actionable recommendations to these disaster-stricken cities and regions. Doing so allowed them to overcome a major hurdle faced by emergency managers and recovery agencies: the inability to build resilience into recovery operations and increase their readiness to bounce back from inevitable future disruptions. Benefits for Research Post-project analyses performed as part of each assessment revealed critical considerations for future resilience researchers and practitioners to better assess and advise in post-disaster scenarios. GRI was also able to refine its processes, which it codified and published in the DRILL operations manual. “ INDIVIDUALS, COMMUNITIES, NATIONS CAN THRIVE only if they have the means to recover from and adapt to inevitable shocks and disruptive events. - Northeastern University President Joseph E. Aoun, President, Northestern University at the launch of GRI, April 201719 14 14 Research Area 3: Transforming Policy and Governance Building societal resilience will only become more challenging in an increasingly complex and interdependent world. With over 80 percent of critical infrastructure owned and/or operated by private stakeholders, addressing this challenge requires a new model for policy making that breaks down sectoral and jurisdictional silos. GRI’s interdisciplinary research model facilitates these relationships, allowing for integrated policies to be developed before disasters and nimble recovery operations to be carried out after one occurs. GRI applied its Framework for Resilience Governance for Infrastructure Dependencies and Interdependencies in two distinct regions:A5 The Boston metropolitan region and the Pacific northwest/Cascadia Subduction Zone. Employing its framework, GRI examined two realistic disaster scenarios (a storm surge related flood and a major earthquake) through the lens of their impacts on the energy and transportation systems that support each region. Between the two projects, GRI engaged with nearly 200 public, private, and academic stakeholders to understand their specific challenges and develop scalable solutions. Major Resilience Accomplishments • Rising Above: Building Resilience in the Energy and Transportation Sectors of the Metro-Boston Region20 • Cascadia Subduction Zone Megaquake: Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies 21 Through these case studies, GRI was able to facilitate connections between policy makers, infrastructure owners and operators, and major industry stakeholders. These connections are critical towards paving the way for sustainable resiliencebuilding efforts. In addition to these connects, GRI also identified critical knowledge gaps – for instance, a potentially crippling misalignment between plans to safely shut down power systems and evacuation strategies in the Boston region – and take initial steps towards enhancing the ability to cope with them. Benefits for Research In both cases, GRI was praised for being a neutral third-party facilitator that brought together traditionally siloed stakeholders in productive workshops and steering committees. This demonstrated the power of having a university institute as a neutral convener in tackling resilience challenges, an approach which has proven critical for GRI’s continued work with communities on resilience-focused economic development strategies. This principle was codified in the project’s final framework for building resilience governance for interdependent infrastructure systems. 15
Applying I-RES for Economic Recovery in New England The national economic crisis precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in millions of Americans becoming unemployed or underemployed, elevated the incidence of housing and food insecurity and reduced access to affordable health care. Recognizing that the COVID-19 emergency was generating both a public health emergency and historical economic disruption, in late March 2020, FEMA Region 1, for the first time ever, activated the federal recovery planning process under the National Disaster Recovery Framework concurrently with the federal response process. They also turned to GRI to support these recovery efforts by developing and conducting resilience-based Rapid Need Assessments for each of the six New England States. Working with each state’s economic and community development agencies, GRI researchers employed the I-RES framework to provide the states with an on-the-ground understanding of the social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 crisis as it unfolded in real time. Central to this effort was the inclusive stakeholder process GRI used to ensure that the most critical needs and priorities were identified to inform the early recovery efforts by federal and state agencies. priority economic recovery needs, helping FEMA and the six states make the case for identifying and responding to urgent challenges. These challenges included a critical shortage of childcare providers, distressed small- and micro-business especially in the tourism and hospitality sectors, housing and food insecurity, and municipal and school budget shortfalls. GRI also provided recommendations for advancing a more equitable, sustainable and resilient economic recovery that has been embraced by FEMA and the New England states. At GRI’s recommendation, officials in each of the six New England states identified three representative communities per state for GRI researchers to engage in extensive community outreach and collect and synthesize data about social and economic impacts of the pandemic. These municipality-based assessments conducted by GRI centered around proven indicators of resilience-basedrecovery, coupled with available state-level data. This approach successfully created an overall picture of current and anticipated recovery issues and needs, requirements for additional technical assistance, and potential opportunities for improving community resilience through federal recovery support. Given the challenges posed by such a dynamic situation, interviews with local stakeholders served as a critically important means of understanding current 1. Rapid assessment of community needs and resilient conditions and likely trends. GRI researchers conducted over recovery priorities Given the unprecedented economic disruption associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the kinds of social and economic data in common use for guiding decisions about COVID-19 economic recovery were of little use. This data is lagging and only was helpful to the extent that it provided a baseline against which precipitous declines could be measured. Further, FEMA’s normal approach of methodically documenting the recovery needs from each stricken jurisdiction were clearly impractical given the breadth of the pandemic – every city in every state and territory were experiencing severe economic loss as a result of the outbreak. It would require too much effort and take too long to assess every impacted community across New England. Having already adapted the I-RES to create resilience-based economic development strategies in New Orleans and Maine, GRI was able to devise an expedited analytical approach for FEMA to quickly understand recovery requirements and marshal needed support from across all federal agencies. Adapting the I-RES method into state “Rapid Needs Assessments” introduced an explicit resilience basis for identifying 16 16 440 interviews from May through August 2020, speaking to a diverse body of stakeholders including residents, local officials, businesses, social, academic, and charitable and faith-based organizations, service providers, and investors. These stakeholder interviews provided insights into the ways in which disruptions in any given sector, such as healthcare, infrastructure, education, labor, small businesses, anchor institutions, and social services, affect the other sectors due to system interdependencies. 2. Grounding recovery planning in diverse community engagement The traditional post-disaster needs assessment approach employed by FEMA largely relies on information provided by emergency management professionals and state/local community leaders. This approach is not particularly well-suited to understanding far-reaching social and economic consequences of complex disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic whose impacts are both dynamic and ongoing. GRI’s interview-based assessment process helped to fill critical data gaps and to anticipate unfolding needs. The I-RES approach recognizes that disruptions frequently exacerbate preexisting societal vulnerabilities and inequities, accelerating effects that may not be immediately visible through examination of commonly-used static datasets. Furthermore, vulnerable populations and people of color are generally under-represented in economic development planning and emergency management. Too often their needs are overlooked as result. Addressing local-level impacts of the COVID-19 crisis requires building understanding about issues such as longstanding healthcare access inequities in a community and unique challenges minority-owned businesses face in accessing state and federal small business support programs. GRI’s community engagement strategy places inclusion and equity-building at the heart of the research process by helping to make visible the connections of these impacts to solutions that will achieve more equitable, sustainable and resilient economic recovery. Industries Interviewed (Total) Industries Interviewed (Total) Industries Interviewed (Total) Supporting New England’s Economic Recovery: 440 Stakeholder Interviews across 6 States and 18 Communities 1% 3% 3% 4% 1% 4% Sectors Interviewed (Total) 3% 3% 5%5% 16% 16% Sectors Interviewed (Total) Sectors Interviewed (Total) 4% 27% 7% 27% 7% 23% 24% 23% 24% 12% 8% 8% 6% 6% 4% 14% 14% 9% 9% 23% 23% 12% 13% 13% GRI provided critical assistance to • FEMA and the New England states by leveraging the I-RES methodology to: • • Conduct a rapid assessment of critical, resilient recovery priorities Grounding recovery planning in inclusive community engagement Linking recovery priorities with critical resilience building strategies 3. Building understanding of resiliencebased strategies for economic recovery Ultimately, GRI’s support for FEMA and the New England states helped make visible the important link between economic recovery and resilience building so that federal support of the states’ recovery programs will be targeted toward durable and equitable recovery initiatives. Based on social, economic, and physical data collection and in-depth community interviews, GRI’s COVID-19 Economic Recovery Research Team identified five core imperatives for investments and recovery actions to be implemented in response to the COVID-19 crisis: A. Stabilize and re-energize the business and commercial sector to promote recovery and adaptation for sustainable and equitable growth. B. Provide support to state and municipal governments to ensure the maintenance of critical services. C. Address basic human needs to ensure a healthy, productive workforce and to develop collaborative and engaged communities. D. Invest in education, workforce development and job creation to prepare diverse community members to succeed in an altered economy. E. Foster public-private partnerships for innovative infrastructure solutions to lay the foundation for resilient economic recovery. In addition to six state level Rapid Need Assessments (RNAs) that identified the priorities for support, GRI was also able to commission the development of 10 Special Investigation Reports by GRI Faculty Affiliates and MIT Lincoln Labs. Informed by the work of the RNAs, these reports bring together analysis and policy recommendations in cross-cutting critical areas including municipal and state budgets, housing, food, healthcare, K-12 education, childcare, higher education, small business, energy, and fisheries. The reports highlighted policy considerations and described interconnecting issues to help identify economic recovery actions that federal and state agencies can take to support the recovery of communities across 17 17 New England.
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