Quote By: Abena Ojetayo, Chief Resilience Officer, Tallahassee, Florida

Abena Ojetayo is the first Chief Resilience Officer for Tallahassee, where she partners across city government and with external stakeholders to build the community’s capacity to adapt and thrive in the face of acute shocks and chronic stresses. She develops a cohesive sustainability and resilience strategy and oversees the integration of effective high-priority policies, programs, and initiatives. Abena has worked in various countries, including as an energy and infrastructure planner for a historic town in Greece devastated by an earthquake; managing an urban design team for a flood prone city in Nigeria, and helping to redesign a future-proof NYC campus in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.

Prediction

Cities will continue to experience unprecedented shocks and stresses to their systems, services, and way of life. Many of these events will feel unpredictable (like the scene of an active shooter), and at times, unavoidable (like being in the path of a hurricane). When disaster strikes, no uplifting hashtag can overshadow real and intentional planning. Federal emergency response aid will continue to decrease and be delayed as disasters become costlier and more frequent. That means cities must prepare to save themselves in the event of a disaster and rely on their own financial reserves to do so. This is the new normal.

From their ever-changing demographics to the exchanges beyond political boundaries, cities today continue to be places of great innovation and also great challenges. For cities that keep their heads in the sand, the impacts of these shocks and stresses will ripple throughout the entire community in profound ways. For those that plan ahead and invest upstream, their efforts will be greeted with enthusiastic new partners from unlikely sectors and innovative financial resources.

2019 Tip

As cities grapple with their increasingly complex systems and a changing climate fraught with risk, the seduction of globalization can tempt communities to take an approach from one corner of the world and apply it wholesale to their locality. But disasters are local, so too resilience must be hyper-local. Building resilience will take planning, mitigation, and adaptation from the global level down to the neighborhood and household levels within an appropriate cultural and historical context. Local government is where the rubber meets the road.

The built environment hardly exists in a void, and social cohesion is essential to community resilience. Here, too, local governments can help bring people together, create distributed yet integrated systems, and model civility. Against the backdrop of sensational 24-hour news, it will feel like the world is ending tomorrow. Strong communities support each other on “blue-sky” days, and on “gray sky days’” they remind each other that the sun will rise again and that together they can build a better future.

Learn More

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In 2017, Puerto Rico was stricken by two hurricanes—Irma and Maria—that wiped out much of the island’s power, water, and communications infrastructure, hampering the coordination of recovery efforts and the delivery of basic municipal services.

Through funding provided to the RAND Corporation by the U.S Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), ICMA helped assemble a team of ICMA Members and partners as pro-bono volunteers to conduct service and governance assessments of Puerto Rico’s 78 municipalities as they recovered from Hurricanes Irma and Maria.

Together with FEMA planners and students and faculty from the University of Puerto Rico, the volunteers conducted research and interviewed mayors, emergency managers, finance directors, public works officials, and other department heads and staff to develop a road map to strengthen municipal disaster resilience in the future. Assessment of municipalities proved difficult given road closures, rolling blackouts and emotional and mental drain that many of the municipal staff were dealing with post-hurricanes, something noted as part of the report and need for additional social services to municipal staff.

Despite the challenges, the team gathered information about the municipal leaders’ long-term priorities to improve the resilience of their communities. The findings informed recommendations for technical assistance and long-term strategies that were reflected in the project’s final report, published by the Government of Puerto Rico, entitled “Transformation and Innovation in the Wake of Devastation: An Economic and Disaster Recovery Plan for Puerto Rico.” Included in the report were recommendations and suggested strategies for providing longer term technical assistance to Puerto Rico’s municipalities in topics like shared services and mutual aid, public private partnerships, and ways to improve capacity building expertise, including through strengthening local associations. This report in turn helped to inform the Governor’s  Congressional Disaster Recovery plan mandated by Congress.