December 2016 - Parks & Recreation - 28

The Los Angeles Department of Recreation
and Parks Emergency Preparedness Section
conducts shelter setup training.

Parks, Recreation and Resilience
By Roland Richardson and Jennifer Cox

very year, increasingly extreme weather events - hurricanes, wildfires, earthquakes, floods - wreak havoc on homes, businesses, municipalities and the
environment. From 1980 to 2015, the United States averaged slightly more
than five weather events per year with damages exceeding $1 billion; in the past
five years (2011-2015), the annual average has more than doubled to 10.8 events. The increased frequency of these events is taking a tremendous national toll - in 2015, losses
attributed to natural disasters in the United States totaled more than $16 billion.
The period of time required for a community to recover from disaster varies - some
rebuild in months, others take years. In
some underserved communities, the job of
rebuilding is never complete. Recovery depends on a community's level of resilience.
Organizations like the United Nations and
a growing number of local governments
and community groups are promoting the
concept of community resilience - defined
as a community's capacity to withstand and
recover from significant disruptions of any
kind by anticipating threats, limiting their
effects and rapidly restoring functionality
after a crisis - as the best approach to man-

Parks & Recreation

aging the risk of natural disasters.
Helping communities to build this
capacity was the inspiration for creating the Alliance for National and Community Resilience (ANCR) (http://bit.
ly/2eLZYvN). During the past year, the
International Code Council (ICC) has coled the effort to create ANCR, a nonprofit
alliance tasked with developing the tools,
processes and metrics necessary for communities to increase their resilience. Resilient communities are not only prepared to
help prevent or minimize losses and damage, but they also have the ability to quickly
return citizens to work, reopen businesses

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and restore other essential services needed
for a full and timely economic recovery.
ANCR recruited a variety of experts
- emergency managers, planners and architects, and utility representatives - each
focused on a unique component of community resilience. As a major first step, ANCR
is creating a " Resilience Benchmark " that
will identify and rate various community
functions (or the services essential to the
survival of a community), such as transportation, communications and business
continuity.
Using the benchmark, communities
will be able to:
* Better understand what resilience
means in their specific community
* Determine their risk profile, which will
consider and rate all of the potential
risks the community faces
* Assess where they stand on a scale of
resilience
* Access tools and resources to help their

December 2016 - Parks & Recreation

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of December 2016 - Parks & Recreation