Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Resilience: Nature’s Lessons for Surviving Its Worst Moods
The recent earthquakes in Nepal, along with the ongoing and tragic aftermath in local cities and villages, bring to mind inevitable questions about what type of community planning might have prevented the worst of the damage and chaos.
One of the key concepts from ecology is resilience, the ability to maintain or regain equilibrium in the face of such disruptions.
While the main idea of resilience has been translated to other fields, the details of making such concepts work are quite another challenge.
One group that is putting it to practice on a broad scale is the Rockefeller Foundation with its 100 Resilient Cities program. The initiative recognizes the demographic imperative of a world that is becoming more crowded and urban, with an increasing scarcity of resources and less predictable climate. To address these trends, the program seeks to help 100 select cities solve endemic problems that might compromise their existence in the face of a natural disaster like the Nepal earthquake....