RAPID: Scalability and Sustainability in Uncertain Environments: Recovery from the Nepal Earthquakes of April 25 and May 12, 2015

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Understanding recovery processes after disaster is critical to building disaster resilient communities. As the frequency, cost, and scope of disaster events increase, the need escalates for incorporating planning for recovery from such events into updated plans for mitigation and response. This integrated effort is essential at all levels of governmental jurisdiction: municipal, county/district/regional, state/provincial, national, and international. Such planning will identify the conditions that accelerate a community's cumulative exposure to risk, the points at which this exposure can be interrupted or slowed, and the sequence of steps that can most effectively and quickly restore a damaged community to functional operation. Developing a viable model for community recovery after disaster represents a global need, one that is especially relevant to US cities like New Orleans that is still struggling with recovery ten years after the devastating hurricane and flood of 2005. Other US cities, like Seattle and Los Angeles, face recurring seismic risk, while Miami and Houston anticipate destructive storms accompanied by sea level rise in the coming decades. Charleston copes with both hurricanes and seismic risk. Anticipating thresholds of risk as they accrue over time at different scales of operation, and planning appropriate mechanisms for risk reduction and recovery are basic strategies for designing sustainable communities that are resilient to hazards, a national imperative. This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) study, carefully executed, will show the threshold points of decision that lead to sustainable recovery and resilience in environments exposed to continuing risk, and, conversely, the points at which a community's cumulative exposure to risk threatens to slide back into vulnerable conditions that trigger other hazards, leading to accelerated risk and potential disaster. Pre-emptive recovery planning will benefit not only the community at risk, but the entire nation. Determining the criteria that enable communities to recover from destructive events quickly in sustainable ways represents a major intellectual challenge. This study of disaster recovery will be based on the actual context of seismic risk in Nepal, and the issues that are involved in incorporating mitigation of multihazard risk into disaster recovery processes as investment for a sustainable community. The study will examine recovery from disaster as a process that occurs at multiple scales of organizational and jurisdictional decision making over a one-year period, from July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016. It will analyze especially the uses of information technology as a primary tool for engaging communities in their own recovery. The model draws on three major concepts that have informed the study of organizational decision making: collective action, or how people learn to work together; information systems, or how information flows effectively within and among people and organizations to guide informed action; and fields of action, or how values and personal examples of leadership shape actions in uncertain environments. The study will use different methods of analysis, including Bayesian influence diagrams and system dynamics, to track the flow of information, influence, technical change, types of knowledge, level of skills, and gaps in performance that characterize a society recovering from disaster. The model, carefully developed, will have a global impact for communities at risk.