COVID and Climate: Exploring Categorical Resilience in the Built Environment

Abstract

This chapter provides a perspective on the parallels between resilience activities associated with climate change and the ongoing COVID responses in the U.S. Through the lens of the built environment, this chapter provides selected insights into how various disaster, organizational, and engineering resilience activities have likely positively shaped COVID responses within the healthcare sector. These reciprocal influences are contextualized within extensive efforts within public health and healthcare management to calibrate community resilience frameworks and practices for utilization in everything from advancing community health to the continuity of health care facilities and operations. Thereafter, the chapter shifts focus to speculate on how ongoing experiences under COVID might yield positive impacts for future resilience designs, plans and policies within housing and the built environment. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the theoretical limitations of resilience that are further exposed by the dual and concurrent challenges of climate change and COVID. In particular, limitations to social learning and adaptive capacity for multilateral communication intelligence are explored as future avenues for resilience development. Through this perspective, the chapter hopes to highlight those often overlooked aspects of the physical and social parameters of the built environment that may be understood as providing opportunities to inform future disaster, public health, and climate change preparations and responses.