In June I wrote a series of short LOTRW posts on the future of emergency management. ICYMI, here’s a link to the fourth of these, which in turn links to the three earlier posts.
In part the series was motivated by recent events in this space: natural disasters; federal level cutbacks in major agency players such as NOAA and FEMA; and inspiring local-level approaches already underway that might compensate a bit for the declining level of protection for Americans in the face of such cutbacks. Significant transitions are underway.
In part, though, I was also cramming for my finals – doing a little urgent homework before participating in a plenary panel discussion at the 50th Annual Hazards Research and Applications Workshop, held in Broomfield, Colorado July 13-16. The topic for the session was Assessing Current Conditions – Challenges to Emergency Management. The session moderator was Michael Newman, former Department of Treasury and currently with the Institute for Business and Home Safety. The other three panelists were Susan Cutter, a professor of geography at the University of South Carolina, and a holder of multiple fistfuls of national and international recognition such as elected membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters; Jessica Jensen, a former professor in emergency management and disaster science at the University of South Dakota, and currently a policy researcher at the Research and Development Corporation (RAND); and Adam Smith, formerly NOAA, where for 15 years, he was the lead scientist for NOAA’s U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters Program. As an Asheville resident, Adam also brought a firsthand perspective on the disastrous Asheville flooding resulting from Hurricane Helene.
A bit of background. The workshop has long been one of my favorite annual meetings. Each year it brings together several hundred hazards professionals spanning the gamut from research in the earth sciences and social sciences underlying the study of hazards; to practitioners working at international, national, state and local levels in hazard mitigation, emergency management, etc.; and to local-level political, corporate and tribal leaders personally and professionally impacted by recent events. Participation is by invitation only but the tradition has been to have something like a third of the participants be first-timers/early career, and students. It’s an amazing 3-1/2 days, followed by a day and a half of breakout sessions for researchers and practitioners separately. I first attended a workshop in the 1980’s and had been coming pretty much every year since until covid hit.
This year I participated with some caution given the federal funding picture. I expected the attendance to be diminished and the atmosphere to be subdued. The opposite proved to be the case. I was surprised but shouldn’t have been. Attendance was down somewhat, but bolstered by an unusually large contingent of early-career participants. The enthusiasm level in the sessions and in the hallways was high. To some extent this was organic. The hazards community is populated by people who see reduction of disaster risk as a calling versus a lucrative career (to be abandoned if the lucre dries up). They’re not in it for the money. But the other factor was a superhuman level of courage and effort by the host staff from the University of Colorado Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center, and its director, Lori Peek. They stood up the meeting in the face of myriad concerns, none of which materialized. It was a privilege to be there.
It was also a privilege to be on the panel. I learned so much from the other speakers and from the Q&A. I don’t know whether to characterize it as passion made substantive by insights or insights brought to life by passion but it was great.
The best news is you don’t have to take my word for it! We learned after the fact that the plenary sessions had been recorded. You can view ours here. You can judge the merits for yourself; come up with your own list of takeaways.
But don’t stop there! For example, the plenary session that followed ours was entitled Imagining Future Possibilities – Moving from Vision to Reality. It provided five perspectives for the future – not from folks who had been around a while, but from early-career professionals who will be the ones building that future for the next half-century. And emphasizing the way things look and what needs to be done from the viewpoint of a range of under-represented groups.
As the session began, I was in the audience thinking this should be interesting! After the first speaker, I was thinking – hey, that was really insightful! After the first two speakers, I was even more impressed. And it kept getting better and better from there.
By the end I realized:
All challenges and uncertainties aside, the future is in good hands.