Purpose
In this activity, you will gather information from a variety of sources about what shocks and stressors are already impacting your community’s economic, environmental, and social health and wellbeing.
Why?
To plan for the future, you must first understand what shocks and stressors have historically impacted your community. At the same time, the foundation of any resilience planning effort depends on having accurate and up-to-date information on the range of environmental, social, and economic conditions your community already faces. Information, and our access to it, are always changing. Keeping pace with these changes through internal efforts or strategic partnerships can help you protect and nurture your community, especially as risk patterns change.
When?
This process can take anywhere from several weeks to several months. You can select the level of detail and the amount of information and data gathering that is appropriate for the scope of your project or assessment.
Tips
- Look beyond historic events. Historic events are not always a good indicator of what shocks and stressors may impact your community in the future. It is important to contextualize that information as you gather data. It is important to think of both new hazards and risks that may emerge as well as old hazards operating in new and more dangerous ways.
- Align your resilience and recovery planning efforts. Consider how past recovery efforts from previous events have aligned with resilience planning efforts already happening in your community. What strengths were demonstrated? What barriers were encountered?
How does my community do this?
- Locate relevant data sources. Start by looking at the Resources and Guides template in the workbook. This template will be utilized in Activity 1 and 2. There are many resources available for gathering information about hazards, especially as it relates to weather, climate, past disaster events, and critical developments to communities in Colorado. Similarly, there are a growing number of tools available for extracting information about the people, places, things, and systems that communities care about and rely upon. There are a variety of important data sources available to you at the State and Federal level (see the Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool (RAPT)).
- Next, define the basic characteristics of your community. Key questions include what is the geographic location and size of your community and important demographic criteria. This information can be used for a variety of planning processes such as fulfilling the need to understand risk and understand needs and capacities in a pre-disaster recovery plan. Additionally, you might examine how critical transportation hubs, networks, and infrastructure define the region’s access to resources, as outlined in this Recovery Planning Template. Note that the 2020 Colorado Resiliency Framework is intended to provide you with tools to easily gather the information needed, and to develop a concise, but thorough, narrative that presents baseline information needed to support the development of your resiliency strategy.
- Define your community’s characteristics and key indicators by sector. The Shocks and Stressors template in the workbook can get you started. Shocks and stressors impact the variety of sectors in your community in unique and specific ways. Defining the unique attributes of your community by sector will help you identify the historic, current, and future projected impacts to your community and develop resilience strategies to address those impacts. Using the six sectors that are defined in the Colorado Resiliency Framework (page 9) may help you define your community characteristics, though you should not feel required to do the same. These sectors include Community; Economic; Health and Social; Housing; Infrastructure; and Watersheds and Natural Resources. You are encouraged to consider what best fits your community. Key questions include:
- What does resilience mean for the sector?
- What does this look like in action? What are the shocks and stresses most often associated with this sector?
- What potential strategies could enhance resiliency in this sector?
- Identify current and potential future shocks and stressors. The Colorado Resiliency Office has many resources to help you with this task (see the Colorado Resiliency Framework, StoryMap, and dashboard). In addition, historic events and an estimate of the impact can be found at the US Census Bureau OnTheMap tool or Future Avoided Cost Explorer Tool. Defining those shocks and stressors are key to understanding how they may be changing and how you can develop resilience strategies to address them. It may also be useful to outline shocks and stressors as they may impact critical sectors and frontline community members, which your advisors and stakeholders can help inform. Key questions include:
- Which long-term stressors will impact your community’s ability to plan for, respond to, and recover from hazard events?
- Which environmental, climate, weather, or man-made hazards have the potential to impact your community in ways that hinder its well-being?
Resources Call Out
Use credible data sources. There are all sorts of data already available to help support your exploration of future changes and risks to the community. Start with the following resources to define risk in your community.
- USDA Census of Agriculture
- Headwaters Economics Neighborhoods at Risk Tool
- Colorado Future Avoided Costs Explorer
- Colorado EnviroScreen 2.0
- State Demographer’s Office
- Community Inclusion in Colorado Map Database
- Colorado Climate Change Vulnerability Study
- Climate Change in Colorado
- State of Colorado Hazard Mitigation Plan
- Colorado Climate Plan
- Colorado Resilience Framework
- Colorado Water Plan and Technical Update Report (formerly State Water Supply Initiative)