The Power of Resilience after 9/11
Adrienne Arsht, founder of the Adrienne Arsht Center for Resilience and executive vice chair of the Atlantic Council, talks to Axios about why resilience matters.
Our Approach
- The Adrienne Arsht Center for Resilience takes a “wide-angle lens” approach to examining key challenges posed by major disruptive forces, whether natural or man-made.
- The Adrienne Arsht Center for Resilience focuses on finding ways to build capacity around the core traits of resilience – resourcefulness, robustness, redundancy, learning, participation, connectivity, and polycentric governance.
- The Adrienne Arsht Center for Resilience educates and advocates using innovative tools to reach a range of audiences.
Our Work
Pandemics
One hundred years after the 1918 Spanish Flu—which infected between 20 and 40 percent of the population worldwide and caused an estimated twenty to one hundred million deaths—the threat of a pandemic remains high, and the vulnerability of the global community is growing. While it is essential to take all reasonable steps to prevent future pandemics, prevention alone is not a sufficient strategy. Nor will it be possible to mitigate all the effects of a pandemic outbreak, even with robust response capabilities including vaccines and treatments. Looking at the pandemic threat through a resilience lens can help civil society address the challenge holistically and mitigate as many risks as possible, while also developing approaches to manage the inevitable effects of a pandemic.
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May 7, 2018The Gathering Health Storm Inside North Korea, by the Commission on Strengthening America's Health Security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, examines how the United States and others can improve the immediate health and humanitarian situation inside North Korea, while planning for the future. Christine Wormuth, director of the Adrienne Arsht Center for Resilience, is a member of the Commission and co-author.
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November 17, 2017The combination of megacities and transoceanic air travel means that a global pandemic can emerge from a trip to the airport and some very bad luck—a reality demonstrated by past experiences with SARS, Ebola, and Zika, and one at risk of repeating itself in the waning but still ongoing plague outbreak in Madagascar.
Counter-Radicalization
Although the fortunes of specific terrorist groups may wax and wane, the underlying phenomenon—aggrieved actors using violence to further their political goals—remains robust. Seeking to reverse a nearly ten-fold increase in the number of terrorist attacks worldwide since the early 2000s, governing institutions from the local to the global level are confronting strategic and tactical questions of how best to promote economic growth, educate youth, and counter radical ideologies. Resilience-oriented work in this space will consider drivers of extremism and programs aimed at countering extremism in order to build a greater public understanding of these issues and to improve counter-radicalization policy.
Disaster Risk Reduction
Severe weather, climate change, and natural disasters are often difficult to predict, but their severity is increasing and their frequency is rising. By one count, the number of disasters worldwide has quadrupled since 1970. Although the imperative to build resilient systems often comes into sharpest focus in the midst of a storm, prudently managing risk requires taking steps in the months, years, and decades before the next natural disaster strikes. Based on the principle that resilience requires prudently managing risk long before the next storm hits, and requires toughness the long recovery process afterwards, our work will focus on providing insights and recommendations on steps that governments, the private sector, and individuals can take to reduce risks.
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October 2, 2017Why was the United States able to move within hours to help Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, but our effort to assist Puerto Rico, a US territory, seems to have taken a week to get off the ground? Politics aside, the devastation Maria caused in Puerto Rico puts the spotlight on four fundamentals of disaster response in the United States.
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February 5, 2018This report analyzes the costs and benefits of city-wide adoption of smart surfaces across Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and El Paso to strengthen resilience, improve health and livability, reduce urban inequality, and slow global warming while saving billions of dollars.
Resilience Roundtables
One of our key functions is to convene experts and practitioners for regular discussions aimed at generating practical solutions to important policy problems. Above the fray of partisan politics, Resilience Roundtables are a venue for timely and insightful debate, often between disparate communities. Resilience is an interdisciplinary field; developing and defining solutions requires input from experts with diverse backgrounds. While participants differ depending on the specific issue, they often include national and international policy makers, elected officials, local community leaders, and city officials, as well as representatives from businesses, nonprofits, and other non-state actors.
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