A Long-Term Outlook
Sustainable practices (and the awareness of the principles of sustainability) introduced during recovery planning or actual recovery can be institutionalized within the community’s decision-making, budgeting, and planning processes to ensure that they endure over time. Ideally, a community would develop indicators and a schedule for monitoring and tracking change and needed improvements. Such institutionalization would help build awareness of the many aspects of sustainability as local residents, public officials, city staff, and businesses come and go. The heightened awareness would in turn nurture an acceptance of sustainable practices as a local, public value and a way of life.
Using the holistic recovery framework, applying the sustainability principles, and employing a process like the 10-step procedure create additional benefits for a community. For one thing, they promote links, conceptual and operational, among different community interests and the groups that seek to further them. For example, how many times have people discovered—inadvertently—that those responsible for local parks and recreation actually are interested in the same sort of open space improvements that the wildlife advocates want? This process makes such serendipitous convergence more likely and helps solidify future collaboration, thus making it easier and more cost-effective for the community to accomplish its overall goals and carry out routine activities.
Another benefit to hazards managers is that drawing on the broad range of sustainability principles instead of just thinking about hazards in isolation makes it more likely that the hazard mitigation approaches that are adopted and carried out will actually minimize losses in the long run. It helps ensure that the mitigation measure(s) implemented will be valuable because they are paired with other community desires, and long-lasting, because they do not detract from other aspects of overall sustainability. Losses will not have to be borne, damage repaired, and victims compensated again and again in future disasters.
Conclusion
Throughout the nation, local community, county, state, and federal agencies have become accustomed to thinking in terms of “building in” hazards mitigation during many recovery activities. This movement has been helped by the advent of federal disaster programs and policies that provide legal, technical, and financial support for taking these sensible, long-term, cost-saving measures. As a next step in this evolution, we can begin to incorporate sustainability as another element within disaster recovery, and reap even broader and longer-term benefits.
Besides advancing ideals that improve the livability and appeal of a community, this holistic recovery approach can also help local residents to think and rethink their community goals and ponder the kind of place they want their grandchildren to inherit. It can encourage each locality to carefully balance risk vs. protection, cost vs. benefit, today vs. tomorrow.
The holistic recovery framework described here does not guarantee that every sustainability principle will actually be included in disaster recovery, but it does ensure that they will at least be considered. Holistic recovery is a sensible approach to recovering from a disaster. It helps a community work toward fully coordinating available recovery assistance and funding with measures to accomplish broader community goals and priorities. At the same time, it widens the goals of the recovery to encompass many aspects of a community that may not have been considered before.