Resilient America

About Weather and other extreme events are increasing and becoming more destructive throughout the United States and around the world. The academic, public, and private sectors share a need to increase understanding of risk and extreme events; to better communicate, manage, and mitigate exposure associated with extreme events; and to develop strategies that build resilience to such events. Over the past several years, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) has begun to address this need. NASEM's Office of Special Projects (OSP) within the Policy and Global Affairs Division was established in 1997 to manage cross-divisional program activities. Today, OSP's primary focus revolves around disasters, risk, and resilience. In August 2012, the National Research Council (NRC) released a report Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative that provided recommendations around critical issues of resilience and strategic steps for the United States to build disaster resilience. The report defines resilience as the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, or more successfully adapt to actual or potential adverse events. The 2012 NRC report generated strong interest across the country for follow-on projects to test or implement the recommendations laid out in the report. Four recommendations from the report that were especially relevant to building resilience at the local level in communities provided the foundation for OSP's Program on Risk, Resilience, and Extreme Events (a.k.a., the ResilientAmerica Program) which was started up in 2014 for an initial three-year period to help communities build resilience to extreme events. The Resilient America Roundtable was launched to implement these recommendations: Understand, communicate, and manage risk Share data and information about tools, best practices, hazards, and policies that build resilience Measure resilience Build and strengthen coalitions and partnerships with diverse community stakeholders across the public, private, nonprofit, and academic sectors Through meetings, workshops and other activities, Resilient America brings together experts from the public, private, nonprofit and academic sectors to advance discussions about resilience; incubate ideas and projects; and conduct education, outreach, and community exchange that builds community and national resilience to disasters and extreme events.