#Weather Ready Cities
1) What are the major stakes of the problem/challenge; why does it number among the five most important problems in urban sustainability?
Community resilience is the ability and capacity of a community to absorb, withstand, and recover from the impacts of a future disaster. A major problem with the process that many communities use as a benchmark for increasing their resilience is a lack of considering the potential changes to future weather scenarios. For example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has many programs that attempt to build resilience in communities. For flooding the common goal is to mitigate (i.e., build resilience) the risks within the 1% annual chance (100 year) floodplain. However, research suggests that changes to climate (e.g., changes in rainfall) and to the landscape (e.g., less water storage from agricultural tiling and impervious surface increases in urban areas) are impacting the floodplains in the US whereby communities are at risk to more frequent and more intense floods than ever before. This is true for other hazards such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and winter storms. The costs of disasters are increasing and as urban areas continue to expand, the changes to these hazards will continue to impact more people every year unless communities begin to consider the future conditions.
2) What is are specific central challenges in this area that are yet unresolved?
Weather resilience is the driver for many of the other topics considered during discussions of urban sustainability making it one of the most important urban resilience topics to study. Water quality and quantity, global food supplies, and energy demands are all driven by (or impacted by) current and future climate conditions. In order to move forward in community resilience, the community must understand the potential changes to current hazards in the future. For many communities the uncertainty associated with future conditions (e.g., how much will a warming climate impact our floodplains or water supply?) has left them without a strategy for considering planning options that integrate these changes. This remains as the biggest challenge in this field of study, risk communication from science to society that includes the changes to hazards from anthropogenic causes.
3) How does UW have a comparative advantage in this area?
The University of Wisconsin Department of Atmospheric Science is recognized as a leader in atmospheric science research globally. In the same building exists three research centers (CCR, SSEC, CIMSS) that specialize in weather, climate, and hydrological research science. The campus also has faculty that have been considering future rainfall and flooding regimes (Ken Potter and David Liebl) and the impacts of those scenarios. For flooding resilience this campus is fortunate to have external relationships with the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM) and the US Geological Survey (USGS). These agencies are in close proximity to the campus and have a national focus on flooding and building flood resilience.
4) If tasked with solving this specific challenge, what is the roadmap of steps that we would follow to address this problem (using a research/engagement model that has a "studio"-like component).
It has long been established that building resilience requires ‘buy-in’ from the public. Successful communities have a populace and decision-making body that embraces the actions required to build resilience. A weather resilience research strategy for an urban setting would be as follows:
Hazard Assessment - Building risk-based scenarios for various hazards that consider past trends and possible future conditions for a community.
Bring together experts in this area to build the most likely scenarios.
Risk Identification - Identify what the current and future risks (social, economic, infrastructure) are to a community.
Work with the community to identify their assets.
Risk Communication. (This is the most important step of all of the steps.) Researchers have to bring this information back to the community and communicate it in a way such that the risks are tangible.
Workshops, presentations, interactive web environments
From Risk to Action. Researchers work with the community to identify a beginning to end strategy for implementing resilience based actions. This involves discussing the projects, possible sources of funding, agencies that might help bring this action to completion. This could involve establishing a community-based planning team that’s ongoing focus is to actively pursue resilience projects.
Engage community leaders, local planning agencies, emergency management.