Lessons Learned from "Disaster Tech for Resilient People"

On February 26th, New America’s Resource Security team gathered a group of disaster responders, resilience builders, scientists, policy experts, technologists, and storytellers to workshop one question: how does — or doesn’t — existing technology meet the needs of systematically underrepresented and underserved populations before, during, and after natural disasters?

To create a common operating picture (to borrow the DoD term) for the afternoon workshop, we hosted moderated conversations (livestreamed here) with four relatively local experts on disaster management, climate change, disability advocacy, and disaster storytelling: Christopher Rodriguez, Director of DC’s HSEMA office; Bernadette Woods Placky, Director of Climate Central’s Climate Matters program; Linda Mastandrea, Director of FEMA’s Office of Disability Integration and Coordination; and Amanda Ripley, author of The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes — and a former New America fellow.

Their combined experiences proved to be invaluable to the afternoon’s discussions, which will be profiled in a forthcoming report. The main themes of the expert conversations were:

Communities:

• The only way to know what a community needs is to actually know the community. Every city, neighborhood, and street is unique, and therefore has unique needs. There is no way to know what someone needs if you don’t know anything about the someone.
• Prepare individuals in order to prepare communities. Being able to recognize what your risks are, building emergency plans as a family, and knowing where to get reliable information are all mitigation strategies that anyone can — and should — do before an emergency. People don’t know what they don’t know. Community advocates can help individuals recognize how to implement the above kind of personal preparedness.
• Consider underserved communities in advance. Governments, first responders, and voluntary organizations need to be able to anticipate what a community needs before they need it. Systematically underrepresented communities are at a significant disadvantage, as their needs are already not being met. Those existing barriers will be amplified during crisis.
  • Include underserved populations in disaster management and mitigation discussions. The members of these communities, which range from racial minorities to older people to people with disabilities, know better than anyone else what their risks are. They must be afforded the opportunity to represent themselves to emergency managers to ensure their needs are recognized— before it’s too late to prepare.
  • Vulnerability is not inherent; it is created and enforced by systematic factors. City planning, zoning, and technology sector disparities between communities are all structural barriers that manufacture vulnerability, more often than not to the detriment of African American and low-income communities.
• Build Public-Private partnerships —before the emergency. Public institutions do not have the capacity to respond alone; private sector partners can provide critical data and tech, or offer temporary shelter/food to evacuees. But these links cannot be forged on the fly in a crisis, not if they are going to be strong.

Science & Technology:

• For toolmakers: “simplify, simplify, simplify.” Emergency managers need to be able to make quick, data-based decisions. Technologists building tools just for the sake of building can impede that process with excessive complexity. From a human-centered design approach, streamlined, simple tools — ideally that are plug-and-play or interoperable with existing tools — will have the greatest impact.
• Stop debating about whether climate change is happening or not— because it is. The science is concrete. The only remaining debate on this front is purely political.
  • Address climate mitigation at the local level. Climate change already affects everyone — but it does so in different ways. Resilience strategies must be tailored to, if not created by, individual communities.

Communications:

• Data scientists and communicators need to work together. In conversation with each other, these experts can use data to find what members of the public, and especially underserved populations, are thinking about already, and what they’re likely to be receptive to. From there, this collaborative can present solid, scientific information in a way that is readily consumable.
• Reporters tell the same stories about disasters — and it disempowers readers. Presenting an audience with story after story about massive destruction and human tragedy can scare readers to the point that they bury their head in the metaphorical sand. Reporters have a responsibility to try harder to find another narrative within the disaster.
• Reporters have the ability — and perhaps responsibility — to give readers agency during crisis. To do that, they need to first trust their readers will not panic reading about disaster. In the vein of the previous point, they need to tell readers not only about what happened, but about what people did to mitigate damage/survive/rebuild. In doing so, they can enable action.