Sustainability Learning Communities Network

1. Sustainability Learning Communities Network A UCGIS Workshop Nina Lam May 20, 2013

2. Key Challenges • What is sustainability? • What is sustainability science? • What kind of expertise is required? • How would GIS expertise contribute?

3. Are there challenging, focused sustainability problems that GIS would make the greatest impacts?

4. A focus on disaster, resilience, sustainability? - requires multi-facet data - requires multi-disciplinary expertise - requires computation - requires decision making on-the-fly - allows citizen science

5. “Forget sustainability. It’s about resilience” (A headline of a New York Times article by Andrew Zoll. Source: The Chronicle Review, May 10, 2013).

6. A Pressing Global Concern Response, recovery, and resilience to environmental disasters is a pressing global concern; Solution requires collaboration among researchers from multiple disciplines, policy makers, community stakeholders, first responders, and the citizens.

7. Active participation from international, federal, state, NGO, industry, media, citizens, and academies

8. Active participation from international, federal, state, NGO, industry, media, citizens, and academies

9. Active participation from international, federal, state, NGO, industry, media, citizens, and academies

10. Active participation from international, federal, state, NGO, industry, media, citizens, and academies A proactive response to managing the most vulnerable coast in the U.S.

11. Active participation from international, federal, state, NGO, industry, media, citizens, and academies An inspiring documentary reinforcing the threat of climate change and the need for preparedness.

12. Active participation from international, federal, state, NGO, industry, media, citizens, and academies Do we have a document similar to this? Which communities recover and sustain, and why?

13. International Perspectives How are we going to pay for disasters? Shifting the responsibility to citizens to manage risk Avoid complacency (some disasters may not affect you directly, but the effects will propagate) Need to evaluate all aspects of resilience Need curriculum to teach resilience Resilience to disasters is directly linked to development What will risk look like in 25 years?

14. Federal, state, NGO Perspectives Are we subsidizing risk? Should the government pay for it (Insurance does not do that)? Where is the revenue to fund disasters. Decisions made at the local level often times are short-term Efficiency has become enemy of resilience How to maintain critical functions? How to involve businesses - to invest in a risky environment?

15. Reinsurance industry perspectives Business challenge - company uses past as proxies to future - must quantify risks and investment return - why invest 50 years from now? leveraging insurance as a tool recovery funds can incenticize prevention inject personal responsibility link top-down and bottom-up science is important talk to people

16. Academic Perspectives The need for a new national framework for a “culture of disaster resilience” that includes: 1. Public awareness and responsibility of managing local risk 2. Establishing the economic and human value of resilience to encourage long-term resilience 3. Metrics and measurement for understanding resilience and monitoring progress 4. Creating local capacity (bottom-up approaches) 5. Identifying sound policies (top-down) 6. Communications! (Source: NRC report: Disaster Resilience, 2012)

17. The new dual challenges: Resilience and Sustainability Sustainability: “the capacity of society to meet its current needs while assuring the well being of future generations.” Resilience: “the capacity for a system to survive, adapt, and flourish in the face of change and uncertainty.” Resilience insures continuity; Sustainability insures balance; Resilience is a prerequisite of sustainability; Long-term resilience is sustainability

18. The new dual challenges: Resilience and Sustainability Our tendency to manage risks rather than building resilience Reactive and neglect long-term needs Beyond disasters, should consider slow-moving threats Long-term sustainability may be at odds with short-term resilience The need to understand the dynamics, as tightly coupled systems Integrated assessment

19. The new dual challenges: Resilience and Sustainability The path forward: Learning and communication Collaboration across sectors Establishing a culture of resilience Developing methods for evaluating resilience Developing resilient and sustainable systems (Source: Hecht, Resilience and Sustainability Workshop, NCSE Conference 2013)

20. The new dual challenges: Resilience and Sustainability Learning and Communication Use the right language for the right audience Use story-telling to illustrate unintended consequences Leverage information technology to advance collective learning Incorporate systems thinking into education and training Develop case studies to document success and failures (Source: Hecht, Resilience and Sustainability Workshop, NCSE Conference 2013)

21. Our path forward • develop a body of knowledge on sustainability science with a focus on GIS • Identify the skill sets required for sustainability science and management • Develop real case studies to demonstrate how online collaborative approach could speed up discovery and help achieve sustainability

22. Three ongoing projects 1. Business return in New Orleans: Decision making amid post-Katrina uncertainty (funded by NSF; Nina Lam, Kelley Pace, Richard Campanella, James LeSage) Development of an empirical model for measuring community resilience (funded by USDA/NSF; Nina Lam & Margaret Reams) 3. Coupled natural-human dynamics in a vulnerable coastal system (funded by NSF; Nina Lam, Kam-biu Liu, Margaret Reams, Victor Rivera-Monroy, Jun Xu, David Dismukes, Kelley Pace)