1.
Living Resiliently on a Crowding, Turbulent Planet
Andrew C. Revkin, Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding, Pace University, Dot Earth blogger, The
New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/revkin)
Human communities will always be in harm’s way even as we improve our technological and
societalcapacity for withstanding threats -- either natural or of our own making. This is partly
because history and geography have placed many of our centers of habitation and commerce
in zones of implicit hazard. Just two examples are severe and recurring seismic activity in
Istanbul1 and the inevitability of a calamitous storm surge in New York City.2 The
superimposition of allure, utility and dangerledgeographer Peirce Lewis to call New Orleans
an “impossible but inevitable city.”3
The inevitability of calamity also springs from another (and exceedingly uncomfortable)
reality:The same technologies and collaborative skills that create civil, sophisticated societies
can also be turned against them by those embracing the darker side of human nature. The
coordinated and unprecedented tactics of the men who conceived and carried out the
momentous and terrible attacks of Sept. 11, 20014illustrate how preventive strategies only go
so far when countering the inventiveness that can accompany evil.
Another critical metric amplifying the importance of preparing for inevitable disasters and
their aftermath is the trajectory for human development in the next half century – which
almost assuredly will add another two billion people to the seven billion alive today.5 Most of
that growth will come in cities, both old and efficient and new-built, sprawling and
chaotic.6Accompanying the growth in numbers is the projected construction of more new
square footage of buildings in the next few decades than all of the structures erected through
all of human history combined. Structures that are built well can be havens; those built
poorly can be death traps.
1Andrew C. Revkin, “Disaster Awaits Cities in Earthquake Zones,” Feb. 24, 2010, The New York Times.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/science/earth/25quake.html)
2Mireya Navarro, “New York Is Lagging as Seas and Risks Rise, Critics Warn,” Sept. 10, 2012, The New York
Times (http://nyti.ms/PcSg61).
3 Peirce F. Lewis, “New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape,” 2nd edition, 2003, U. of Virginia Press.
4 9/11 Commission Report, http://www.9-11commission.gov/report
5Andrew C. Revkin, “The Future of Calamity,” Jan. 2, 2005, The New York Times.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/weekinreview/02revk.html)
6Neil Peirce and Curtis Johnson, “Century of the City (No Time to Lose),” 2008, the Rockefeller Foundation.

2.
As Pace University President Stephen J. Friedman explained in opening the January Summit
on Resilience, cities and nations have demonstrated some success in boosting vigilance,
preparedness and emergency responses, but appear to lag in developing the organizational,
financial and political tools needed for disaster-resistant planning and efficient and smart
rebuilding and redevelopment after the worst has happened.
In her plenary talk, Margareta Wahlström, the Special Representative of the United Nations
Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction, noted how the damage from 2011 flooding
in Bangkok, which had global economic ramifications bydisrupting the flow of vital
components for computers (insured losses were $20 billion), was the result of the unplanned
and sprawling canal network and footprint of the vast city. “We are building cities that
actually generate the disasters that destroy their viability,” she said.
There are ample signs, particularly in Asia’s fast-spreading industrial zones,7 that the lessons
from the Thailand flooding have not been integrated in many other places facing identical,
and inevitable, threats. In the discussion at the New York City meeting, which was co-
sponsored by the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., a range of panelists from
academia, corporations and agencies recognized that there are no simple templates or
protocols for transferring lessons and innovations arising in one country’s, or city’s, disaster
zone to others.
But it was clear to many participants that one path to better outcomeslies in building and
sustainingforums and networks through which best practices and painful lessons are shared
across all sectors of society, and from one society to others.
The logic in pursuing a borderless approach to fostering resilience in the face of inevitable
disasters is a matter of both ethics and economics. The disruptions to global supply chains
following the Bangkok floods and, of course, Japan’s extraordinary triple shock from a major
earthquake, tsunami and radiation release reveal the interconnectedness that can quickly
make a major regional catastrophe into a global event.Within the United States and each of
its cities, great and small, there is a similar imperative to plan and invest for the worst, and to
reserve yet more attention and investment for increasing the capacity to respond to, and
recover from, unforeseeable hazards as well.
7David Fogarty and Clare Baldwin, “Flood risk rampant across Asia's factory zones,” July 22, 2012, Reuters.
(http://finance.yahoo.com/news/insight-flood-risk-rampant-across-181627999.html)

3.
One critical pathway for facilitating fruitful exchanges is the explosively expanding global
network of computer, telecommunications and social networks. It is not by chance that
Margareta Wahlström and the United Nations office of disaster risk reduction maintain
energetic presence on Twitter8 (via @WahlstromM and @unisdr and the “hashtag” #iddr).
While some still see Twitter as yet another Web distraction, she and her staff (as with
officials at United States agencies dealing with various disaster risks) see it as a vital two-way
sensory apparatus for sharing ideas and information before, during and after an emergency.
Only through sustained engagement, from the scale of face-to-face campus forums to global
Internet connectedness, can disaster planners, elected officials, citizens and companies hope
to keep pace with the scope of risks, both to lives and wealth9, attending the next phase of
humanity’s extraordinary growth spurt.
A core theme at the meeting was that a boosted capacity to withstand and recover from
disasters will not come by establishing some set menu of protocols and responsibilities. Ivan
Seidenberg, who as chairman of the board of Verizon Communications Inc. deals
continually with managing resilient responses to emergencies, went so far as to challenge,
playfully, Albert Einstein’s menu for saving the world. While Einstein said that, if given an
hour, he would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and the final minute designing a
solution, Seidenberg noted that in a fast-changing world, the rules and stakes – the very
nature of the question – are in constant flux. That kind of situation requires a commitment
to constant reevaluation, to learning and adjusting, to knowing resilience building is not
accomplished from the top down, and is not a task, but a trait.
Former Governor Tom Ridge, in his keynote talk, echoed this line of thinking. In a single
line, he distilled the importance of creating a national culture attuned to the importance of
resilience, from family homes to college campuses to corporate boardrooms and beyond.
“Homeland security isn’t an agency,” he said. “It’s a national mission.”
8 Search for their Twitter output here: http://j.mp/UNdisastertwitter
9Andrew C. Revkin, “The Varied Costs of Catastrophe,” March 29, 2011, The New York Times.
(http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/the-varied-costs-of-catastrophe)