Issue: Adaptation/Resilience

Investing in community-based groups and networks is necessary to build resilience for good emergency response. This report studied different community responses to COVID-19 to help us imagine better responses to climate disaster impacts. During the COVID-19 pandemic, established community organizations, newly formed grassroots efforts, government, and funders all came together in various configurations, based on preexisting relationships and networks. Racism and other systems of oppression were the primary drivers behind COVID inequities. The people interviewed for this report agreed that our cities and our state governments were unprepared for COVID and that we are similarly unprepared for climate change emergencies. What is specifically needed to be better prepared for responses to climate crisis emergencies is investment in the capacity of the organizations themselves, including people (most importantly), back-of-house infrastructure, and technology. Building resilience must be people focused, intersectional, institutional, and rooted in anti-racist/anti-oppressive ideology and practice.

California and the US are increasingly beset by climate-fueled disasters like wildfires, extreme heat, and power blackouts. These events put additional stress on frayed hard and social infrastructure systems, and disproportionately impact working-class communities of color. To adapt to these changes, society must update our notion of disaster response to increase resilience in these systems before disasters strike. This report offers two models for this response: 1) building and normalizing resilience hubs where community members gather and organize both in good times and bad, and 2) increasing in-home resilience by recognizing homecare workers as effective agents for assisting vulnerable populations and bridging authorities and the frontlines. The report goes on to recommend specific ways to set up resilience hubs, train care workers, and develop forward-thinking emergency response plans to avert human disasters after natural disasters.

Dystopian plots focusing on a catastrophic future caused by climate change often immobilize rather than spur action. But decades of evidence and experience from health communication shows that techniques of entertainment-education are effective at changing behaviors. But these are rarely used for climate change (a notable [and hilarious] exception).