Community Resilience

Resilience is the capacity of the community to absorb a disturbance and regenerate the essential services that are needed to sustain and evolve the community’s functions, structure, and identity. An alternative definition of resilience, offered by the National Academies in "Disaster Resilience," is the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events. To be more specific, we need to answer three questions:

• Resilience of what? - Resilience of the community’s functions, structure, and identity in response to stressors and disturbances

• Resilience to what? - To internal and external perturbations and events, natural or man-made, that threaten the robustness of the essential services that preserve the community’s functions, structure, and identity

• Resilience for whom? - For humans and all living things in the community and for the larger ecosystem that support the community’s existence and evolution

Community Resources

A community utilizes a variety of internal and external resources to create the essential services that support the community's functions, structure, and identity. For resiliency, we are primarily interested in the community's internal resources and its ability to regenerate the essential services that help the community anticipate, respond to, and overcome adversities.

These resources can be categorized as follows:

• Natural resources - air, water, land, forests, rivers, shoreline, etc.

• Human resources - people, labor, creativity, collaboration, etc.

• Technological resources - technology infrastructure, technical know how

• Social resources - individual relationships, social groups, organizations, etc.

• Cultural resources

• Financial resources

• Production resources

• The built environment

Stressors & Uncertainties

A community is subject to a variety of stressors and disruptions. Here is a partial list:

• Natural events - earthquakes, severe weather, floods, fire, etc.

• Man-made disruptions - war, economic crisis, pollution, ecosystem destruction, unchecked consumption, failures in industrial, technological, and engineering systems, unbalanced exploitation of non-renewable natural resources, etc.

• Scarcity of essential resources - clean water, clean air, food, energy, etc.

• Scarcity of essential services - services for health and wellness

• Inequality and disparity in access to resources

• Discrimination and prejudice towards people

And then there are natural events that become disasters due to man-made decisions, such as building homes in a flood zone, or building cities below sea level next to the ocean.

Response to these events can be through better planning and anticipation of recurring events.

And finally, there are black swan events. These are unforeseen events that have extremely low likelihood but have extremely large impact. A successful response to a black swan event will depend on the system's ability to leverage multiple information pathways and redundancy in core services to be able to maintain its essential functions during the event and regenerate the lost or damaged functions and linkages after the event.

Community Resilience Roadmap

In future blogs we will look at individual services that enable a community to survive and thrive in a changing environment subject to random events. Some of these services are provided and consumed entirely within the community itself while others are acquired through interactions with other communities or higher level entities.

Here is a more comprehensive list of such resources and services:

• Energy production, storage, delivery, and consumption

• Food production, distribution, consumption, and recycling

• Water treatment, distribution, consumption, and recycling

• The built environment - houses, buildings, roads, parks, etc.

• Decarbonization

• Social connections and relationships

• Commerce and community enterprises

• Health and medical services

• Transportation

• Learning & Education

• Engineering and technological infrastructure

• Labor and knowhow

• Sustainable consumption & recycling

• Equity & compensation

• Fairness, equality, and tolerance for diversity

• Informed and responsible governance

• Social justice

• Culture, art, and values for creative expression

• Public safety

• Criminal justice

Finally, a community's resilience is inseparable from the resilience and wellbeing of the larger system within which it resides. As such, we assume that the community's relationship with other subsystems is governed by the principles of accepting diversity, respecting the autonomy of individual subsystems, and adopting a balanced and sustainable way of life for the entire system.

NIRU focuses on optimizing communities' internal energy resources and services while recognizing that their resilience is interdependent with the larger grid system. We approach this relationship through three guiding principles:

1. Embracing resource diversity to enhance adaptability

2. Respecting subsystem autonomy while maintaining interconnection, and

3. Advancing sustainability for both local and grid-wide operations.

Our work navigates the critical balance between community energy independence and integrated system resilience, ensuring decentralized solutions strengthen rather than isolate from the broader energy infrastructure.