2018 ESIP Winter Meeting

Place-based community resilience has emerged as a U.S. national priority with the expectation that it can improve human livelihoods, address environmental change, and prepare communities and households to cope with hazards and disasters (Cutter et al. 2013; NSTC 2014; PCAST 2011). Increased application of Earth Science data for urban and place-based community decision-making can help to inform and enhance social and infrastructural resilience to environmental events and climate change. In this session, we seek to identify specific ways that Earth Science data and the ESIP community can contribute to enhancing place-based community resilience. As our case study for the session, we focus on small- to medium-sized US towns that have city planning staff.

This session builds on previous work conducted at ESIP on community resilience (summer 2015) and integration of multidisciplinary datasets (winter 2017), and current work conducted by the co-organizers on city resilience planning and community development, climate resilience decision-making (Data to Decisions for Climate Resilience ESIP cluster), and capacity-building for stakeholders of city resilience through the use of existing templates.

In this session, we first highlight the data challenges that have been identified in specific cases of U.S. towns that address community resilience issues in their city planning, and architecture, engineering and construction companies that tactically work on the digital infrastructure aspects of city planning. Then, we will introduce some examples of how these challenges may be addressed (e.g., reproducible, traceable, data-driven analytical approaches for integrating societal values and biogeophysical models; emerging technologies for monitoring the environment; indicator datasets; development of templates). We offer some thoughts on how we could realize the value, as well as the cost of not having data, data services, and planning in place to support community resilience.

For the remainder of the session, we lead a discussion with the participants that focuses on: 1) What are potential linkages between data-driven community resilience and other ESIP work, as well as with the overall Earth Science data community?; and 2) What are specific ways that ESIP can contribute specifically to place-based community resilience? We propose that supporting the Earth Science data needs for place-based community resilience and sustainability may be one of the most appropriate spaces for ESIP to direct and emphasize its socioeconomic impact.