Reuters Insider - Planning for tomorrow's cities: safe, resilient, and strong

Cass Information Systems

28/11/2014 22:07

Click the following link to watch video:                              
 https://insider.thomsonreuters.com/link.html?cn=share&cid=1333776&shareToken=MzpjNTcyMWJmZC1hYzNjLTQ5ZGMtOTg5OC0wZjg4NWNmNmYyNDM%3D&playerName=ReutersNews 
                                                                       
 Source:             Thomson Reuters                                   
                                                                       
 Description:        At the Rand "Politics Aside" conference, a panel  
                     of experts talk about the converging threat of    
                     globalization, urbanization, and climate change on 
                     the world's largest cities.                       
 
 
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 Short Link:  http://reut.rs/1vwS2QY  
 
 
Transcript (May be auto-generated)

 Good morning, welcome. This is RAND's fourth "Politics Aside" and we all, 
everyone who's involved with RAND appreciate very much your being here today and
participating in the discussions. Your support is vital to what we do at RAND. 
You help ensure the creativity of our researchers and the independence of the 
institution through your support. We're fortunate this year at "Politics Aside" 
to have our three supporting sponsors - Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, PepsiCo and 
Union Bank. And then we have a longer list of sponsors of RAND, Pardee RAND 
Graduate School scholars - Fred Pardee, PNC, Sierra Investment Management, 
Donald and Susan Rice, Lynda and Stewart Resnick and Wells Fargo. We're grateful
to each and every one of them. And thanks too to our media sponsor once again 
this year Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters will be filming today's discussions 
so be sure to look for also recommended discussions when they appear on either 
Reuters.com or Rand.org. Now just a few housekeeping matters. Many of the 
panelists today and the speakers have written books and have written some recent
books. We'll have a bookstore, it's been a tradition at RAND set up in our 
library where you can purchase copies of the books written by our speakers. For 
recharging cell phones, laptops and so on, there are some stations right outside
the back of this room. And then finally if you're active on Twitter and each 
year more and more of our audience are active on Twitter, the hash tag for 
capturing the commentary following and contributing to it is 
#politicsaside@rand.org. So now we'll just dive right in and it's an honor for 
me to introduce our first speaker Doctor Judith Rodin. She is about to complete 
very soon 10 years as the President of the Rockefeller Foundation. She's a 
research psychologist originally by training. She was Provost and Dean of the 
Graduate School at Yale and then President of the University of Pennsylvania 
where she became the first woman to head an institution in the Ivy League. I was
telling Doctor Rodin earlier my wife and I were four year, full tuition paying 
parents while she was president. Worth every penny. So her new book is called 
"The Resilience Dividend" and it explores what it means to be strong in a world 
when things go wrong. And I'm very proud that RAND is working with the 
Rockefeller Foundation on issues of resilience and environmental adaptation. And
after Doctor Rodin speaks, Anita Chandra who leads RAND's research on resilience
and one of our divisions will delve further into the issues that Doctor Rodin 
introduces with Cas Holloway who recently served as New York's Deputy Mayor for 
Operations. So it's a great pleasure to open "Politics Aside" with Doctor Judith
Rodin. Thank you very much for that generous introduction and good morning 
everyone. I want to thank you and all our friends at RAND for hosting this 
conference and for giving all of us the chance to reflect that in the recent 
elections and he state of the country more broadly. In a forum such as this, one
that emphasizes evidence and indeed which are too often lost in a heated 
political season, as Cas knows, our former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg loved 
to say "In God, we trust. Everybody else bring data." So today I want to talk 
about what the data are telling us and what I believe should be a top economic 
and social priority as we chart our way forward and that is this idea of 
building resilience. It's actually fitting to be doing so here in Los Angeles so
close to Hollywood. 

Every time we stepped into a movie theater, we're reminded of the horrors that 
await us when we step out - flooding, earthquakes, sharknados, Matthew 
McConaughey's monologues. But it doesn't get as much film time perhaps are the 
slower burning stresses, those that chip away at the fabric of our communities 
and weaken our ability to bounce back after those major shocks - persistent and 
pervasive inequalities in income and education, traffic congestion, failing 
infrastructure. The increasing frequency of both these stresses and shocks is no
longer reserved just for the big screen. It is our current reality. Crisis has 
become the new normal. 

Partly it's because of the converging triple threat of globalization, 
urbanization and climate change. A week doesn't go by that we don't see some 
kind of disturbance somewhere in the world to the normal flow of things - a 
cyber attack, a new strain of virus, a structural failure, a violent storm, 
civil conflict. But not every disruption has to become a disaster. There are 
ways to avoid the unmanageable and manage the avoidable. It comes with building 
resilience which is the capacity of any entity - whether it's an individual or a
community, a city, a business - to prepare for disruption, to recover more 
quickly and more effectively from shocks and stresses and even to be able to 
adapt and grow from a disruptive experience. We need to stop lurching from 
crisis to crisis and shift our paradigm from disaster relief and recovery to one
of prevention and return. In the United States, the average number of natural 
disasters alone has tripled annually since the 1980s. 12 of the 15 most 
expensive storms in the world in the last 50 years have occurred since 2000 and 
12 of those 15 have been in the United States. At the same time, the government 
has been playing an increasing role in covering disaster losses, topping out at 
80% for Superstorm Sandy which was more than triple the percentage that the 
federal government covered after Hurricane Hugo in 1989. And it's not just 
natural disasters that are on the rise. Cyber terrorism is a leading threat both
to our national security and also to our economic competitiveness. On average it
is estimated that a company is attacked by hackers 17,000 times a year. And a 
recent survey by Verizon Enterprise Solutions showed that only 5% of all 
retailers could self identify a breach. Think of that as you pull out your 
credit card to start your holiday shopping. These and so many other threats 
affect our lives, affect our nation's social fabric and our economic value of 
our nation and also that of our cities, our companies, our communities. The good
news is that resilience is not an inherited trait. Resilience is a skill that 
can be learned. And from a decade of working on resilience in post-Katrina New 
Orleans, in cities all around the world, and our engagement in New York 
post-Sandy, we know a great deal about what makes a community and organization 
or a system resilient. Building resilience requires five principles and all 
resilient entities have these in common. First, they are aware of their 
vulnerabilities and their assets. 

They have the willingness and the ability to assess, to take in new information 
and to adjust to that information using monitoring and feedback loops. Second 
they're diverse and redundant in the types of backups and the types of 
alternatives that they can access. So that if one part of the system is 
challenged, it can rely on another that's readily available. Third, they are 
integrated in the way they share information ensuring coordination across all 
components. The left hand knows what the right hand is doing, and they're 
working together towards the same goals. Fourth, they're self regulating meaning
that if one part of the system fails, the entity can de-link that part to keep 
the problems from spreading. It's the difference between safe failure and 
failing catastrophically. Finally, resilient entities are adaptive. They have 
the capacity to adjust to changing circumstances by developing new plans, by 
taking new actions or modifying quickly past behaviors. The entity is flexible. 
It bends rather than breaks. These are exactly the capacities that we must 
develop whether we're individual citizens or heads of cities, leaders in 
business, leaders in our communities, or leaders in Washington. Doing the same 
thing over and over again and expecting different results is no longer only 
insanity. It may be tantamount to political malpractice because it's costing us 
billions of Dollars. 

According to the Center on American Progress, the federal government spent 
almost $50 billion from fiscal years 2011 to 2013 just on disaster relief. That 
comes out to roughly $400 a household per year. Yet the dollars spent on 
prevention could save us an average of $4 in lowered damages. Imagine what would
change if we invested that $400 per household on measures that actually made 
those households more resilient. What kinds of returns we could see beyond those
even in the form of lives saved or assets protected, for example the types of 
new jobs and services created and greater community cohesion. That's what I call
the resilience dividend and that is the topic of my new book which just hit the 
bookshelves this week. The process starts with good planning and preparation and
not just for the last crisis but for any crisis. For example in San Francisco, 
the city's readiness and resilience building can be seen in many ways but 
primarily in its Lifelines Council which is an integration of key city 
government and private sector players to facilitate self-regulation and rapid 
restoration of basic services from electricity and power to water and 
communications, to sanitation and transportation. Literally, the city's 
lifelines in the aftermath of any kind of disruption or catastrophe whether it's
an earthquake, an act of terrorism, or severe weather. San Francisco has also 
included its growing sharing economy businesses in its planning, Airbnb and Uber
because their business model is actually built on a resilience principle, and 
that is the effective use of excess capacity. And the city uses Fleet Week as an
opportunity to engage in preparedness exercises with its citizens, turning what 
was traditionally a week of bar crawls by the navy into a planning opportunity 
that yields real benefits in terms of citizen engagement, an increased community
cohesion. We see planning and preparation in Wal-Mart, planning to increase its 
use of onsite renewable energy by 600% by 2020, to enable it to keep its stores 
running in the face of any natural or manmade disaster which is also yielding 
lower energy costs in the good times. That's the resilience dividend. Planning 
and readiness are critical, but they can't always keep bad things from 
happening. When bad things do happen, recovery must not be based on the 
build-it-back mentality that has guided the past. Rather, we need to ensure the 
recovery process unfolds in ways that better prepare us for the future. That's 
what we've been promoting for the New York region in our recovery from 
Superstorm Sandy, and you'll hear more about from Cass. Let me give you just one
example. Through a resilience building lens, we're trying to recover in ways 
that allow us to live with water rather than our current practices which are to 
pave and pipe and pump. For example under the New York rising housing recovery 
program, Governor Cuomo used some of the most flexible of the federal recovery 
funds to offer buyouts for severely damaged homes in some of the most 
storm-ravaged areas of Staten Island. So far, 312 homeowners have taken the 
buyout and relocated to less flood prone areas. The purchase properties were 
then torn down and the land was transformed into coastal buffer zones – parks 
and other non-residential uses – that will protect the remaining nearby 
communities from the impact of extreme weather. And all along the coastline of 
Staten Island, a new way of responding to rising sea levels and wave erosion is 
emerging by creating natural layered habitats and ecosystem protections that 
will catalyze the growth of biodiversity which used to be so rich in those areas
in New York and serve us natural buffers to these threats. The project 
interestingly is also coupled with public school student education programs and 
community engagement initiatives focused on oyster reef restoration to reconnect
residents to their shoreline and to one another. That's the resilience dividend.
This goes to my next point, to build greater resilience, revitalization 
processes must actually begin during the recovery process because that's what 
leads to an effective final phase of revitalization. We saw this in Boulder, 
Colorado when after historic levels of rainfall and flooding in 2013, agencies 
responsible for flood mitigation, for transportation, for parks and recreation, 
for water quality and environmental protection came together. And they partnered
with private developers to develop an extraordinary multipurpose system where 
storm drains are now doubling as bicycle trails, flood gates are doubling as 
transportation routes and recreation areas, an ecosystem that measures or 
providing better water quality. That's the resilience dividend. We've seen it in
businesses like Best Buy reinventing and revitalizing themselves after they'd 
been knocked for a loop. 

Best Buy started as a small Minneapolis St. Paul company called the Sound of 
Music. Its stores were wiped out by the 1981 tornado. They could have closed. 
Statistics show that 25% of all businesses never come back after a disaster. But
instead, they threw out their old model counters and high pressure salesmen and 
home delivery, and they pitched big tents. They stacked all their remaining 
inventory out in the open. ad they slashed their prices to rock bottom. Two 
years later, they branded as Best Buy with this new business model. 

And today, Best Buy is one of the largest electronics retailers in the world. 
And perhaps nowhere have we seen revitalization more than in New Orleans, a case
study actually for the need for building resilience and the dividends that it 
can generate. After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans transformed its public 
education system. It diversified its economy, and it re-energized its 
neighborhoods. Today, the city is actually a magnet for talent and for 
start-ups. And it's piloting new innovative resilience planning projects to 
restore wetlands, to bring down crime rates, and to improve their public health.
That's the resilience dividend. Return on investments that come from every phase
of the process – whether it's readiness, recovery, or revitalization – it's 
more bang for the taxpayer buck, something that people of all political parties 
and ideology should be able to support. And that is critical. Resilience 
building is a process with no ideology. 

The great shocks of our time are not discriminating. They destroy Republican and
Democratic communities alike and there are common sense solutions that lend us 
an opportunity for common ground to work together. Another great mayor once said
there is no Democratic or Republican way to pick up garbage. So goes resilience.
But how do we move from the old paradigm, the current paradigm of disaster 
relief and recovery to one of planning and preparation? I have five broad 
recommendations as examples for where communities, cities, and our leaders in 
Washington can start. First, we must take a much more integrated approach to 
planning. In Hoboken for example, a city very vulnerable to flooding. The city 
is planning the construction of underground parking garages with green 
recreation space on the surface level. This is a project that will deliver a 
triple win. First, it will add much needing parking spaces to the city; second, 
in times of flooding, the garages are engineered using a Dutch technology with 
the capacity to become tanks for water overflow; and third, it creates new green
space for recreation and community cohesion. Three wins for one investment. 
That's the resilience dividend. But without the integration of city departments 
and federal agencies, this concept would never have been thought up, let alone 
fund it. And because of it, each is getting more bang for the buck. Another 
example, Superstar Sandy exposed to crucial need to build resilience in Jamaica 
Bay, which is one of the most densely populated and vulnerable estuaries in the 
United States. And yet, there is no single entity in charge of prioritizing 
these projects or insuring community engagement, threatening to undermine many, 
many necessary efforts. Together, as Michael said, RAND and Rockefeller are 
working to facilitate and support a participatory process that includes city and
state officials, the federal government, and importantly, the affected 
communities to help ensure that future investments are sustainable and that 
they're all in line with the unified vision of building resilience. Already, 
this work is leading to fundamental changes in the thinking of the Army Corps of
Engineers, re-evaluating how they prioritize gray and green infrastructure 
projects such as wetlands restoration, barrier reefs, dunes, flood walls, and 
surge barriers, and how they consider the community's needs in making their 
investments. Second, we need better and more effective tools for cost benefit 
analysis, something that I think is so highly done and sought after by RAND. 
Most public sector investment analysis is done under the assumption that the 
future will be like the past. And in doing so, these models leave out data like 
that cost of carbon pollution or changes in population demographics which leads 
to choices that are inefficient, expensive, and unsustainable. Indeed, many 
cities and states don't do any type of cost benefit analysis. And yet, there are
models that exist which do account for a changing future. Recently, we funded 
the