$1 Invested in Resilience = $13 in Savings
New report on the economic benefits of investing in climate resilience
Hello! Between time spent in Paris, Maryland, California, and Arkansas, this month’s edition will be short and sweet. Wishing you a lovely end to the summer!
Things that caught my eye…
York University announced the creation of Canada’s first PhD program in disaster and emergency management. That is a really big win for our field and its professionalization!
Applications will be open from October 2024 to January 2025.
If I didn’t already have a Master’s degree under my belt, I would seriously consider attending the University of Cambridge’s brand-new MPhil in Global Risk and Resilience, “a one-year taught Master's course which is designed to provide students with a thorough grounding in Global Catastrophic and Existential Risk, how this can be managed and mitigated, and its relationship with transformative socio-technological trends.”
Applications will open up in September 2024 for an October 2025 start date.
Things I’m reading/listening to…
Since crisis management is not a revenue-generating function, we always talk about the potential return on investment (ROI) we can advocate for to generate buy-in from leadership. It’s a constant battle, and this is why I was so pleased to learn about the hard numbers presented in the US Chamber of Commerce’s new report, The Preparedness Payoff: The Economic Benefits of Investing in Climate Resilience.
The main takeaway is that $1 dollar invested in resilience and disaster preparedness saves $13 in economic impact, damage, and cleanup costs after the event.
Previous studies have shown that $1 of investment reduces the damage and cleanup costs of a disaster by $6. Thanks to this new research, we now know that $1 of investment also reduces a community’s economic costs after an event by $7 (think mitigated job losses, reduced incomes, etc.).
The report breaks down five of the 25 disaster scenarios that were modeled and analyzed.
They range in damage and cleanup costs from $1 billion to $130 billion and involve communities of different sizes across the country. Each scenario highlights the jobs saved, workforce preserved, and economic savings that would come from investing up-front in resilience and disaster preparedness programs and resources. This is true in larger metropolitan areas as well as smaller rural areas and towns. It is also true for more severe major disasters and less severe events.
Over the past 10 months, I had the immense pleasure of co-authoring a chapter in a new textbook titled "Current and Emerging Trends in the Management of International Disasters."
Colleagues at the University of Southern California (Dr. Rita Burke and Dr. Christine Raj), Project:Camp (Mikey Latner and Ozzie Baron), and I wrote about integrating children's needs in the disaster management cycle. Per our abstract:
Despite children being at especially high risk during disasters, there is a lack of information and focus on children’s disaster preparedness. Following a scoping review of the literature on children’s disaster preparedness, we identified several gaps and found that many people do not have adequate pediatric disaster training or plans to comfortably manage a disaster situation. Additionally, there was scant literature on health disparities, children with special needs, childcare, and international disaster preparedness. We found several areas in need of improvement but very few recommendations on how to address these concerns. Areas of pediatric focus in the future should prioritize including children in disaster plans (particularly, children with access and functional needs), addressing health disparities, and training those who work with children on disaster preparedness.
I have been perusing others’ contributions, such as Dr. Kesley J. Richardson et al.’s chapter on “The Capable Emergency Management Professional: Emerging Competencies for a Changing World.” The textbook is free to access, so check out the varied work on becoming more proactive, addressing the needs of the vulnerable, improving professionalism in emergency management, and more.
In other news…
I sat down with Kyle King from Crisis Lab to discuss working in public vs. private sector emergency management, the standardization of our field, governance, and what the future holds. You can give it a listen on your podcast platform of choice 🎧