about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States.
This report confronts the topic of how to increase the nation’s resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. The characteristics describe a more resilient nation in which
• Every individual and community in the nation has access to the risk and vulnerability information they need to make their communities more resilient.
• All levels of government, communities, and the private sector have designed resilience strategies and operation plans based on this information.
• Proactive investments and policy decisions have reduced loss of lives, costs, and socioeconomic impacts of future disasters.
• Community coalitions are widely organized, recognized, and supported to provide essential services before and after disasters occur.
• Recovery after disasters is rapid and the per capita federal cost of responding to disasters has been declining for a decade.
• Nationwide, the public is universally safer, healthier, and better educated.
The alternative, the status quo, in which the nation’s approaches to increasing disaster resilience remain unchanged, is a future in which disasters will continue to be very costly in terms of injury; loss of lives, homes, and jobs; business interruption; and other damages.
Building resilience toward the 2030 future vision requires a paradigm shift and a new national “culture of disaster resilience” that includes components of
(1) Taking responsibility for disaster risk;
(2) Addressing the challenge of establishing the core value of resilience in communities, including the use of disaster loss data to foster long-term commitments to enhancing resilience;
(3) Developing and deploying tools or metrics for monitoring progress toward resilience;
(4) Building local, community capacity because decisions and the ultimate resilience of a community are driven from the bottom up;
(5) Understanding the landscape of government policies and practices to help communities increase resilience; and
(6) Identifying and communicating the roles and responsibilities of communities and all levels of government in building resilience.
A set of six actionable recommendations (see Box S-1 at the close of the Summary) are described that will help guide the nation toward increasing national resilience from the local community through to state and federal levels. The report has been informed by published information, the committee’s own