Abstract
Recent directives from the US Office of the President have detailed the need for resilience in the face of increased security threats and natural disasters. While these documents call for resilience improvements, no guiding framework for the assessment of resilience exists. Federal agencies are then deriving individual ways to address resilience, resulting in a series of parallel efforts instead of one national cohesive effort. This paper summarizes the portfolio of current efforts implemented by agencies to guide the integration of resilience assessment across the federal government. We present a critical overview on the state of resilience science within seven federal agencies and our perspective on the consistencies and disparities on how each agency is enacting presidential orders. The resulting analysis identifies differences in approaches to resilience and common ground upon which federal agencies can use to support more effective programs.
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Notes
Originally, the Beach Erosion Board was established in 1930, and the Coastal Engineering Research Board was established by law in 1963 to advise the Chief of Engineers on coastal engineering research and development (Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory, 2015; http://chl.erdc.usace.army.mil/cerb).
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Larkin, S., Fox-Lent, C., Eisenberg, D.A. et al. Benchmarking agency and organizational practices in resilience decision making. Environ Syst Decis 35, 185–195 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-015-9554-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-015-9554-5