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Early Warning Systems to Strengthen the Resilience of Communities to Extreme Events

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Handbook of Disaster Risk Reduction for Resilience

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Abstract

Community resilience is comprised of four pillars, infrastructure, organizational, social, and personal, all of which need consideration when developing, implementing, or improving an early warning system (EWS). The complexity of assessing community resilience is exacerbated by the interconnections between the community’s core components, the multiplicity of hazards that may strike, but primarily by the difficulty to obtain the data to understand these phenomena. By ensuring the four main components are integrated into an EWS, the community will be better able to anticipate and understand hazards, as well as support the preparedness of the communities and their assets to mitigate consequences. A community’s ability to respond to and recover from extreme weather events resulting from climate change requires ongoing community-wide planning and preparation efforts for activities before, during, and after an event. The implementation and adoption of EWS have proved beneficial in alerting individuals of impending climate danger. While acknowledging the increase in extreme climate events, enhanced EWS are needed for greater preparedness to improve community resilience to all types of extreme events.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) was formerly known as the United National International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR).

  2. 2.

    All economic losses and GDP are adjusted at 2017 US$ value.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho Falls, ID, USA

    Ron Fisher & Celia Porod

  2. Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, IL, USA

    Frédéric Petit

Authors
  1. Ron Fisher
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  2. Frédéric Petit
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  3. Celia Porod
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Correspondence to Ron Fisher .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center of Excellence in Risk Management and Natural Hazards, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran

    Saeid Eslamian

  2. McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Faezeh Eslamian

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Fisher, R., Petit, F., Porod, C. (2021). Early Warning Systems to Strengthen the Resilience of Communities to Extreme Events. In: Eslamian, S., Eslamian, F. (eds) Handbook of Disaster Risk Reduction for Resilience. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61278-8_11

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