The Role of Time in Risk and Risk Analysis: Implications for Resilience, Sustainability, and Management.

There is a persistent misconception that risk analysis is only suited for considering the immediate consequences of an event. Such a limitation would make risk analysis unsuitable for many challenges, including resilience, sustainability, and adaptation. Fortunately, there is no such limitation. However, this notion has stemmed from a lack of clarity regarding how time is considered in risk analysis and risk characterization. In this article, we discuss this issue and show that risk science provides concepts and frameworks that can appropriately address time. Ultimately, we propose an adjusted nomenclature for explicitly reflecting time in risk conceptualization and characterizations.

Reframing Resilience: Equitable Access to Essential Services.

We urgently need to put the concept of resilience into practice if we are to prepare our communities for climate change and exacerbated natural hazards. Yet, despite the extensive discussion surrounding community resilience, operationalizing the concept remains challenging. The dominant approaches for assessing resilience focus on either evaluating community characteristics or infrastructure functionality. While both remain useful, they have several limitations to their ability to provide actionable insight. More importantly, the current conceptualizations do not consider essential services or how access is impaired by hazards. We argue that people need access to services such as food, education, health care, and cultural amenities, in addition to water, power, sanitation, and communications, to get back some semblance of normal life. Providing equitable access to these types of services and quickly restoring that access following a disruption are paramount to community resilience. We propose a new conceptualization of community resilience that is based on access to essential services. This reframing of resilience facilitates a new measure of resilience that is spatially explicit and operational. Using two illustrative examples from the impacts of Hurricanes Florence and Michael, we demonstrate how decisionmakers and planners can use this framework to visualize the effect of a hazard and quantify resilience-enhancing interventions. This "equitable access to essentials" approach to community resilience integrates with spatial planning, and will enable communities not only to "bounce back" from a disruption, but to "bound forward" and improve the resilience and quality of life for all residents.