What is Resilience?
With more extreme weather events and increasingly complex challenges in the world, it is more important than ever to understand the risks we face and be prepared. And we are much more resilient when we are connected! Together we can create resilient communities prepared and ready to work together to face challenges.
Your Impact
Action Steps & Tips
Introduction
Today, we are facing many complex challenges. We have all experienced challenges from more extreme weather - bigger storms, droughts or fires - to health, economic or social challenges like we experienced in the recent pandemic. These often can seem too big to solve. However, there are many things we can do to prepare and strengthen our ability to respond. Resilience is all about strengthening our capacity to respond, recover and adapt to major changes and challenges.
There are many important steps you can take to prepare your home and family to be more resilient. However, at the heart of resilience is also connecting with others in your community to help each other. Our relationships with community members — the people with whom we live, work, and spend our time - helps to build a network of people we can trust and rely on when challenges happen. And today, there is growing energy and spreading optimism surrounding the many ways we have available to rebuild these social connections, recognize and celebrate our interdependence, and create greater local self-reliance together. The best part - building community is rewarding and fun. And it’s easy to do. It can all start with a BBQ and an invite...
The main steps to becoming more resilient:
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Prepare yourself and your home
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Connect with your community and build community resilience
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Get involved and help with projects to build community resilience and equity
Read on to learn more about resilience, how climate change is impacting extreme weather, some of the impacts of extreme weather and see an overview of the actions you, your family, and your community can take to prepare and get connected!
1Step 1: What is resilience?
Know Your Risks: The first step in becoming prepared is knowing the risks you face. One of the most basic goals in resilience is being prepared for extreme weather events or natural disasters. Wherever you live almost all of us face a risk from some type of extreme weather event or natural disaster. During a natural disaster, there could be impacts to local services we rely on every day. Some things that could happen:
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Transportation: Roads could be impassable and disrupt evacuations, emergency responders, or basic supplies like food deliveries to grocery stores.
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Communication Systems: phone or internet services could go down making it difficult for family and friends to connect, and to reach emergency services.
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Utilities: Natural disasters may take out power lines or water services, which can limit access to heat, air conditioning or clean water and impact our health.
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Financial Services: Credit card systems and ATMs may not work.
These risks vary based on what extreme weather events or natural disasters are likely in your area. An area with a risk of flooding has different challenges than an area at risk of wildfire. The first step is to know what the risks are in your local area.
Get Prepared: Once you learn the risks you face in your area, the next step is to get prepared! The good news is that there are steps you can take now to prepare that will really make a difference and help you respond! The best part - it’s easy to do. With a little basic preparation we can learn how to stay safe during extreme weather events or disasters and be ready to get by without services for a while until they are back up and running. Get together with your family or housemates, gather some supplies and make a plan so everyone knows what to do.
Get Connected: Being Resilient is also about being connected. During a disaster, being connected with neighbors or others in your community will strengthen your ability to respond as you are able to help each other and respond to challenges together. You can also work together on projects and initiatives to build a more resilient neighborhood and community. Beyond natural disasters, developing connections in the community can also help us navigate more complex challenges like health, social or economic challenges.
2Step 2: Connecting the dots: climate change and extreme weather
One of the main predictions of impact from climate change is more extreme weather events - stronger storms, more intense heat waves and more severe droughts. In a warming climate, there is more moisture in the air and rainfall is predicted to increase including more intense rainfall events. Ocean temperatures are warming which makes tropical storms stronger as tropical storm intensity is directly linked to ocean water temperatures. With a warming climate, glaciers are melting which is creating rising sea levels and more coastal flooding. A warming climate also causes more extreme heat waves and drought.
In the US, heat waves are becoming more intense and lasting longer, rainfall has increased including more intense rain events particularly in the Midwest and Northeast, hurricane intensity has increased and drought has intensified, particularly in the Southwest.
With these increasing risks from climate change, it is important to prepare not only for extreme weather events and disasters as they have happened in the past, but also for potentially larger or more extreme events that may happen in the future. It is also important to take actions to decrease our impact on climate change!
3Step 3: Building Resilience
In the Resilience action category, you will find actions to help you learn about your local risks, get prepared, connect with community and build community equity. Recommended steps to work through the Resilience Actions:
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Start by preparing at home. Learn about your risks and prepare your household. Complete:
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Steps 1-5
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Read the Disaster Specific actions (that apply to your local area)
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Connect with Community. Complete:
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Connect with Community
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Be Prepared Together
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Get Involved: Consider going beyond basic preparedness and complete:
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Sharing resources with neighbors
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Learning First Aid
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Become a CERT volunteer
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Grow Your Own Food
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Complete projects - join with your neighbors or community members to work together on community resilience and equity projects from keeping storm drains clean to sharing garden proceeds to deeper civic engagement and equity actions.
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For each action we’ll help with clear steps and materials, tips and examples to help you get prepared and connected. It’s easy to do! Then you can rest easy, knowing you are prepared!