Booked on Planning

Resilience Matters 2025

• Booked on Planning • Season 4 • Episode 9

Share episode

Resilience is much more than just bouncing back after a disaster. Over the past decade, as climate impacts have intensified, our understanding of what makes communities truly resilient has evolved dramatically. In this conversation with Laurie Mazur, editor of Island Press's "Resilience Matters: 10 Years of Transformative Thinking," we explore how climate resilience has transformed from buzzword to essential framework.

Show Notes:

Marvin Planning Consultants
Serving the planning needs of communities and counties in Nebraska and throughout the Midwest.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Follow us on social media for more content related to each episode:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/booked-on-planning/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BookedPlanning
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bookedonplanning
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bookedonplanning/

Stephanie Rouse:

This episode is brought to you by Marvin Planning Consultants. Marvin Planning Consultants, established in 2009, is committed to their clients and professional organizations. Their team of planners has served on chapter division and national committees, including as the Nebraska chapter president. In addition, they are committed to supporting their chapter in various APA divisions. You're listening to the Booked On Planning Podcast, a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association. In each episode, we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked on Planning. Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked on Planning. In this episode, we talk with editor Laurie Mazur about Island Press's Resilience Matters 2025,. In this episode, we talk with Laurie Mazur about Island Press's Resilience Matters 2025, 10 Years of Transformative Thinking. This year's edition spans a decade of articles on resilience, highlighting key areas in the field as it's evolved since Island Press started this project.

Jennifer Hiatt:

It was so special to be able to talk with Laurie about this accomplishment instead of just discussing it between ourselves. Lori also provides insight into the editing process and how her team goes about selecting the articles that they include every year.

Stephanie Rouse:

Yeah, we've been covering this publication for the past few years as a conversation between us on the articles and you're right, it's really great to actually talk with the editor and get some details behind the work and learn more about their process. I was shocked to find that it's a team of two that creates this lengthy compilation of articles every year.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I was shocked to find that it's a team of two that creates this lengthy compilation of articles every year. Yes, I really felt like we were able to bond over a team of two splitting a bunch of heavy work. In this time of increasing climate disasters, it is important to remain positive, that we can be the change and bring resilience to our communities. Resilience Matters shows us the steps for doing that. So let's get into our conversation with author Lori Mazur about Island Press's Resilience Matters 2025.

Stephanie Rouse:

Well, lori, thank you for joining us on Booked on Planning to talk about Resilience Matters 10 Years of Transformative Thinking. Resilience Matters is a collection of articles and op-eds published on resiliency-related topics each year, this one focusing on articles from the last decade. As editor of this publication, how did this get started and what are the goals of this publication?

Laurie Mazur:

Yeah, well, first, thank you so much for having me. So Resilience Matters is published by Island Press, which is, as you know, a longtime nonprofit environmental book publisher, and about 10 years ago Island Press launched something called the Urban Resilience Project for a couple of reasons.

Laurie Mazur:

First, we saw that there was a great opportunity to help define the emerging field of climate resilience. You know, when we got started, there were more and more climate disasters and the term resilience was being thrown around a lot and becoming something of a buzzword, but it was often just simply defined as bouncing back after a disaster. And, of course, bouncing back to the unsustainable, unjust status quo pretty much guarantees that we get more disasters. So we wanted to explore you know what it would mean to make our communities truly resilient. You know to think about how we could actually bounce forward, you know, to survive and thrive in the era of climate change. And secondly, we saw a lot of new opportunities in the media landscape, because the fact is, people are getting more and more of their news and information online.

Laurie Mazur:

Books, we believe, are still the gold standard, but people are reading more short-form content online and we felt a need to reach them there. So the Urban Resilience Project has tried to both explore and shape thinking on climate resilience, while also finding new ways to reach people in this new, shifting media landscape. So we collaborate with lots of different kinds of folks activists, planners, island Press, book authors and others and we help them produce articles and op-eds and then we place that content in various media mostly online, but also sometimes in print and Resilience Matters is our annual compilation of articles and op-eds that we've helped people publish, and we do this because short form pieces have a very short half-life they flit across the screen and they're gone, and there are just a lot of great ideas in these pieces. So we thought that the compilation was a good way to give them a little more longevity, and then, after 10 years of doing this work, we had a collection of more than 700 articles and op-eds, so we decided to collect some of our favorite pieces into one volume.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Well, we love any opportunity to mention Island Press on this podcast, and this is actually our third year of featuring Resilience Matters, but the first time that we've gotten to speak with you. So you're the editor for Island Press's Urban Resilience Project. How did you connect with Island Press and what is the Urban Resilience Project?

Laurie Mazur:

Well, I actually go way back with Island Press. I published two books with them, one in 1994 and one in 2011. And I've just done a lot of work with them over the years and you know Island Press is really it's just kind of a treasure in this field. You know, as a nonprofit, island Press publishes a lot of important books that would never see the light of day at a commercial publisher.

Stephanie Rouse:

In your introduction you mentioned that over the course of 10 years you've covered over 700 articles. This edition only contains 61, if I counted correctly, in four different topic areas. How did you go about curating which of the articles would make it and then narrowing it down to what just ends up in this document?

Laurie Mazur:

It was so hard. There was a lot of great stuff that was left on the cutting room floor, but we tried to come up with a representative sampling of the many issues that contribute to resilience and there are many and of the you know, diverse perspectives of the authors we work with. There's lots more where that came from.

Stephanie Rouse:

And I'm curious who all is part of the team that reviews and narrows down the articles that end up in the Resilience Matters publications. The team is quite small.

Laurie Mazur:

It is comprised of myself and Kyler Joffroy, who's our online marketing manager, and the two of us are the Urban Resilience Project. I'm the editorial half of the project and I help folks with writing and editing of their articles and op-eds, and then Kyler is the media whisperer who places them in appropriate outlets. That's the whole team.

Jennifer Hiatt:

You guys do a lot of work for a team of two. It's really awesome. We understand that too A lot of work for a team of two.

Laurie Mazur:

I guess you do.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Your first article in this year's Resilience Matters is about not being able to have resilience without having justice and trust. Why did you feel it was important to lead off with this article?

Laurie Mazur:

Yeah, this article by Denise Fairchild highlights something that is just absolutely fundamental about resilience. This is not just a technological issue, it's a people issue. I mean sure in this together that we're connected to our neighbors, that we help each other in hard times. High-profile killings talked about how unjust police killings of Black people was eroding trust, and trust is a bedrock of social cohesion. You know, if you can't trust the authorities, will you evacuate when they tell you to? Will you stay home in quarantine during a pandemic? So you know, a lack of trust is just extremely corrosive to social cohesion and resilience because it can also interfere with disaster response, and we saw that last year in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene when FEMA had to stop work in some places because there were credible threats of violence which had been stoked by right-wing media.

Laurie Mazur:

But at the same time, that particular disaster, I think, also provided a lot of great examples of social cohesion. There was an incredible coming together of people from all walks of life to clear debris and supply drinking water after the city's water system was destroyed. So there are a lot of examples of that too.

Stephanie Rouse:

Yeah, it reminds me one of your authors, daniela Aragoni's book, where she was talking about how community is so important with climate adaptation and climate change, and especially for older adults that need that social network to help them in times of stress and change.

Laurie Mazur:

Yeah, that is so true. And in fact, one of the best examples of this Eric Kleinenberg the sociologist did a book years ago. I think it was called Heat Wave and it was about a heat wave in Chicago in 1998, probably getting stuff wrong here, but he compared these two neighborhoods and they were both low-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods and in that heat wave one had incredibly high mortality rates and the other had very low mortality rates and he showed that the difference between these two communities and you reminded me of this by mentioning Daniel Arrigoni, because most of the fatalities in heat waves and other disasters are among the elderly so he showed that it was community cohesion that literally kept people alive. You know people who were asking about their elderly neighbors and checking on them. So yeah, it's huge.

Stephanie Rouse:

So over 10 years, I'm sure you've seen some changing trends, types of articles that are getting written. So what are some of those big changes that you've seen over the years doing this type of work?

Laurie Mazur:

Yeah, it's been a busy 10 years. There's a lot more coverage of these issues, in part because there are a lot more climate disasters.

Laurie Mazur:

You know, last year we had 27 major weather disasters in the United States which killed 568 people and cost about $180 billion, and that was the second highest number of billion-dollar weather disasters in our history, just behind 2023. So naturally there's more interest in how we can be more resilient in the face of climate change. I think there's also more understanding of the complexity of resilience. You know those people in Asheville who didn't have potable water for four months are thinking about their water system. You know people who have experienced long-term power outages are rethinking. You know whether a massive, interconnected and vulnerable grid is the best way to keep the lights on.

Laurie Mazur:

I think there's a lot more coverage over the last decade of just the basic unfairness of climate impacts, of how they reflect existing inequities and also make them worse. You know, for example, we know that the racist, redlining policies of the 20th century led to underinvestment in black and brown neighborhoods, and we've learned that the lingering effects of those policies now make those neighborhoods more vulnerable to climate impacts because they have more concrete and less green space. These neighborhoods are a lot hotter like 15 degrees hotter than wealthier and greener neighborhoods, and because they're often in low-lying areas with poor infrastructure. These neighborhoods are also more vulnerable to flooding.

Laurie Mazur:

So, I do think that that evolving understanding of resilience is reflected in articles and op-eds on this topic, certainly the ones that we publish.

Jennifer Hiatt:

And speaking of the articles that you have published, you made an almost prophetic statement in 2019 in one of the articles that you wrote, stating the dangers of interdependent societies do not warrant a wholesale retreat from interdependence. That path could leave us isolated and friendless in a dangerous world, and it would dampen the dynism that comes from global trade and goods and ideas. So now, almost six years later, we are in fact headed straight down that path. So how can we find a sweet spot between the interconnectedness that is somewhat harmful and the hyper self-sufficiency that is certainly unharmful in such an unbalanced time, or self-sufficiency that is certainly unharmful in such an unbalanced time.

Laurie Mazur:

Yeah, unbalanced, you got that right. Yeah, it's such a good question. And I think one insight from resilience thinking is that resilience systems tend to be modular. They can connect to larger networks on a good day, but they can also disconnect and be somewhat self-sufficient on a bad day. You know when the grid goes down or there's a global pandemic. So, for example, if your building has solar panels on the roof that are tied to the grid, you benefit from that connection because you can sell your excess power when the sun is shining and you can draw from the grid at night when it's not. And if you also have backup battery storage, you can keep the lights on when the sun is shining and you can draw from the grid at night when it's not. And if you also have backup battery storage, you can keep the lights on when the grid goes down.

Laurie Mazur:

So you know, I think both connectedness and self-sufficiency have value, and the trick, as you said, is in finding the sweet spot between the two, and that spot will be different in different situations, but I think a general rule would be to avoid absolutism on either side, to recognize the value of both. You know, absolutism is say, deciding that trade is harmful to your economy and slapping humongous tariffs on everything. But I think it's important to think about what critical goods or functions would be most vulnerable in a crisis and really work to build in some self-sufficiency in those areas. I mean, of course, this is not how businesses think in this economy, but I think that is changing. I think the days of just-in-time supply chains may be over, because I think people really saw the costs of that approach during the pandemic.

Stephanie Rouse:

And you also touched on a little bit how, when you started Resilience Matters 10 years ago, it was because you know this term resilience was getting thrown around and it was becoming a little more common and trying to help define that. And then, in 2016, you wrote an article that defined resilience as the capacity of a community to anticipate, plan for and mitigate the risks and seize the opportunities associated with environmental and social change. In the last nine years, has this definition changed or has anything in the field changed.

Laurie Mazur:

That you've noticed. I still think that's a pretty good definition of resilience. You'll note that it's not just about climate, but environmental and social change more generally, and that's because we are just living in this era of unprecedented change.

Laurie Mazur:

on so many fronts, We've destabilized the climate and natural systems that we depend on. So that is like a grand experiment we are conducting, the results of which will be unpredictable and often devastating. And at the same time, we have these huge, sprawling global networks of commerce and information that just metastasize disruptions globally, whether they are financial crises or pandemics. And then, at the same time, we have these new technologies like artificial intelligence that promise to reshape our world in ways that we can barely imagine.

Laurie Mazur:

So yeah, resilience is all about coping with change good and bad and making sure that the risks and the benefits of those changes are fairly shared so that everybody has a chance to live a good life. I will say that that remains an aspirational goal. We're pretty far from achieving it, but I think it's still the right goal.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Have to keep your aspirations and make sure they're high. So I'm a policy wonk, so I really love that you have a whole section about policy in Resilience Matters, and the former presidential administration was considered one of the greenest in history. But our current administration has decided to take action, reversing most of those green policies. I know there's never one single like silver bullet solution, but what are one or two policies you'd urge leaders at any governmental level to start implementing immediately? That would have the biggest change.

Laurie Mazur:

Yeah, and you're absolutely right. The Biden administration's Inflation Reduction Act was the nation's biggest ever investment in climate. It was like nearly $400 billion, I think, for clean energy and climate justice and lots of good stuff. There was also funding for disaster mitigation in various spending bills. Another important thing they did was to require that public infrastructure that was damaged in climate impacts be rebuilt in a way that prevents future damage, which makes so much sense, so that taxpayers don't have to keep paying to rebuild the same bridge over and over again.

Laurie Mazur:

But now, as you said, the current administration is reversing course, to put it mildly. They're trying to claw back the funds and cancel any programs related to climate or clean energy, and also rolling back the regulations that the Biden administration implemented on you know, sort of building resilience into public infrastructure. They've launched a full-scale assault on climate science and information, cutting funds for NOAA so that we can't track greenhouse gases or even the weather and, of course, canceling the National Climate Assessment that communities and businesses rely on to plan their futures. So I think the theory seems to be that what we don't know about climate change won't hurt us, but I would say that's pretty much the opposite of the truth. So what to do Vote, of course. I think a lot of Americans care about climate resilience, but don't carry that concern into the voting booth. So if we want policies that reflect our concern about climate resilience, it's time to make this voting issue.

Laurie Mazur:

I think there's also just a tremendous amount that we can do at the local and state and regional levels, and I will say that local, community-based groups have really shown themselves to be the MVPs of resilience. These are groups that build trust and social cohesion by responding to people's immediate concerns. So I think they are kind of uniquely situated to identify and solve community problems, community problems, and a lot of these groups have come up with policy solutions that have since been adopted at higher levels or in other cities and localities, and they're also the first line of defense in any disruption like a hurricane or a pandemic, before the official help arrives. I know it's not a policy, but I would recommend finding a group like that in your community or starting one to figure out what the policies are that are needed where you live. And thinking about policies, I mean there's so much to do, but since it's almost summer, maybe I could focus on some policies for dealing with extreme heat, which, as we said, is by far the deadliest climate impact, especially for older people. So I think in your community you can advocate for cooling centers or bus shelters that protect people from the sun.

Laurie Mazur:

I mean, these are small changes that really make a huge difference. Some communities have instituted programs to provide air conditioners for people who can't afford them, and again, these are often elderly people living on fixed incomes who are absolutely the most at risk from extreme heat. A few states have passed legislation that prevents utilities from shutting off people's electricity during a heat wave, which again saves lives. Protections for outdoor workers are really important, like mandating water and shade breaks. We've seen some states trying to well, succeeding actually in rolling back such protections. I know Texas and Florida come to mind. Protections were instituted by localities and then they were rolled back by the state legislature. But again, these are policies that save lives and we should all be working to promote.

Stephanie Rouse:

You know, I think your point about localities being more important in the next four years for moving this forward is a good one, and right during the transition in January, I think the message came down from our mayor that the Conference of Mayors was like we've been here before, we had to pick up the mantle. It wasn't the federal government. So cities and communities are really having to step up and we can do this again. It's just going to take some more intentionality, more connections and working together at the local level.

Laurie Mazur:

Yeah, absolutely I agree, and you know, cities have been just great innovators on policy in this area, so it's a natural role for them.

Stephanie Rouse:

So there was a quote from an article you wrote about the first Unitarian Universalist church in Orange, new Jersey. That I think sums up a lot of the articles and it said it's a way of getting to know our neighbors, not coming in with answers from the outside. What do you think were some of the more impactful stories of neighborhoods and communities leading action versus outsiders coming in with solutions?

Laurie Mazur:

There's so many. One of my favorites is about a group called Catalyst Miami in Miami Florida, and this is a community group that kept hearing from their folks that they were really struggling with the hotter summers and the county had a climate policy, but it was mostly focused at that point this was about 10 years ago, I guess it was mostly focused on sea level rise, which is admittedly an existential threat in South Florida, but the county officials said that they couldn't act on heat because they didn't really have data aside from what they got on the weather report.

Laurie Mazur:

The weather report came from measurements that were taken at the airport and not in places where people live or walk to school or wait for a bus. So Catalyst Miami teamed up with a local university to do citizen science, where they placed heat sensors in places where people were actually experiencing the heat in their apartments, the bus stops and you know. They found that it was a lot hotter in a lot of those places than it was at the airport. So they shared that data with the county and the county then went ahead and appointed the nation's first chief heat officer who has gone on to develop a comprehensive plan for dealing with extreme heat.

Laurie Mazur:

Also, there have been, I think, seven cities that have since adopted chief heat officers, including, if I'm not mistaken, phoenix. So I mean this was a total bottom-up solution of people figuring out what was the most important issue in their community. You know, taking charge of the research, going to government, but in all cases partnering with scientists, partnering with local government to come up with solutions, and they have come up with some really innovative policies in that area. Another group of stories there are some stories in the book about communities that were affected by repeated floods, who got together to fight for change, like the folks in DeSoto, missouri, whose community flooded four times in three years, and they started a Facebook group and started asking questions and complaining and they caught the attention of a national network of flood survivor groups called Higher Ground, and this network has partnered with scientists from something called the Thriving Earth Exchange, a program of the American Geophysical Union, and they work together to sort of study the problem in these locations and then raise money from the federal government to implement local solutions.

Laurie Mazur:

And they've done a lot of really innovative green infrastructure projects in their communities to absorb the floodwaters, so yeah, they have a lot of amazing stories of work they've done and again, it came from the bottom up and was enhanced by building a network and connecting across all of these localities. So great stuff.

Jennifer Hiatt:

What direction do you see resilience moving toward in the next 10 years? So when we meet again and we discuss the 20 year edition of Resilience Matters, I think those articles are going to cover.

Laurie Mazur:

Oh, I don't know, somebody else may be in charge by then, but yeah, good question. I think that there will be more pragmatic success stories from the local level, because people just have no other choice but to adapt, and that is and will be, I think, in red states as well as blue states. You know, I think one of the stories in Resilience Matters that I thought was really interesting is about how the state of Alabama has implemented some of the best building codes in the country to protect homes from extreme weather. You know, this is a state that does not officially recognize climate change as a thing, but they were seeing insurers pull out of their state and I think that is a development that really focuses the mind. So I think a lot of states across the political divide and localities are just going to have to adapt, and I think we'll be seeing more and more of that. Whatever they call it, whatever people say they are adapting to, they're going to have to do it if they want to remain where they are.

Laurie Mazur:

Speaking of remaining where you are, I think there will be much more focus on managed retreat. You know, right now, about 50 million people live in US coastal cities. That's about one in seven Americans. You know those are some of the most vulnerable places to rising seas and stronger storms, to rising seas and stronger storms, and a lot of those places will be uninsurable, if not uninhabitable, in the next decade. So I think it's really past time to think about planning to relocate people and property before we are forced to do so, because I think if it's the latter, it will wind up being done in a way that just you know is really devastating for the most vulnerable people. So that's a conversation I think we'll be hearing more about.

Stephanie Rouse:

It's interesting. Jennifer and I are reading Miami and the Anthropocene right now. There was a statistic that and I can't remember which projection year it is, but somewhere far out in the future, with rising sea level, that there's something like several billion dollars worth of property that will be underwater by that point in time if the projections continue as they're seeing. So it's just a crazy amount of shoreline that we're going to lose.

Laurie Mazur:

Yeah, and just put in a plug for an organization that is really thinking about these issues, the Urban Ocean Lab. It's run by Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, who I hope you're looking at her books. She's done some great stuff. She wrote it's not an Island Press book, but I'm going to plug it anyway a contributed volume called All we Can Save, and she has a newer book out as well. But anyway, her organization, the Urban Ocean Lab, has done some great thinking about coastal cities in the era of climate change.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Stephanie and I live in Nebraska Not an issue for you, Not that part of it. But the climate change issues. No one knows them more intimately than our farmers. They talk about it all the time. They just don't call it climate change most of the time, and we are also facing an inability or rising costs for homeowners insurance because of the massive hailstorms that have started ripping through our state. So we are acutely aware of the problems that you were just talking about.

Laurie Mazur:

Oh, my goodness. Yeah, and you know it's really interesting to me in reporting that piece on building codes is there's so much that we already know how to do. I don't know about hailstorms specifically, but you know, on the issue of severe storms and hurricanes, there are just these really simple fixes that are about making sure that the roof is securely attached to the building. They don't cost very much and, you know, it can be the difference between saving the home and losing it. So, yeah, there's a lot of scope for positive change.

Jennifer Hiatt:

Agreed. So always our final question, because this is Booked on Planning. We're clearly big readers. What books would you recommend our readers check out?

Laurie Mazur:

Well, I work for Island Press. I have a lot of book suggestions. Kate Mingoya's book Climate Action for Busy People is a great book that just shows how we can get over being overwhelmed by climate change and take action. You know, right now, in our communities that will make a difference.

Laurie Mazur:

We mentioned Danielle Aragoni and her book Climate Resilience for an Aging Nation. I think it's just a really important and timely book about the collision between climate change and our rapidly aging population, where people over 65 will soon outnumber those under 18. And I don't think any of our communities are thinking hard enough about how to protect those folks. Resilient Cities by Peter Newman, timothy Beatley and Heather Boyer, who is also the executive editor at Island Press, is full of really inspiring stories about cities that have created efficient transportation systems and green spaces and lower carbon buildings. So a lot of great inspiration there. And maybe the last one I will mention it's not so much focused on planning or urban areas, but it's a book called Resilience Thinking and it's an older Island Press book that kind of changed my life, I have to say. It's an introduction really to systems thinking and the resilience thinking that came out of the natural sciences, which I think has lots of application in the built environment. It's a really interesting book.

Jennifer Hiatt:

I have to say systems thinking keeps popping up again and again. It's a really interesting book. I have to say systems thinking keeps popping up again and again. We read a book called multi-solving about systems thinking another island press book. It definitely came up in our last conversations. It's been everywhere.

Laurie Mazur:

It is everywhere, it's all connected and it's like once you see that you don't unsee it, and it's also kind of a theory of change. I mean, all systems are different but they share some characteristics and life cycles and seeing sort of where you are in your system and its life cycle is just really helpful. But I heartily endorse multisolving. That's another game-changing, mind-opening book heartily endorsed multisolving.

Stephanie Rouse:

That's another game-changing, mind-opening book. Well, lori, really appreciate you joining us to talk about Resilience Matters 10 Years of Transformative Thinking. It's been a really great conversation and more fun interviewing you than Jennifer and I just talking about the articles that we read. So I appreciate you joining us for this.

Laurie Mazur:

Well, it was my great pleasure and I admire what you're doing and happy to be a part of it.

Jennifer Hiatt:

We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Lori Mazur about Island Press's Resilience Matters 2025, 10 Years of Transformative Thinking. You can access the article by going to Island Press's website or click the link in the show notes to take you directly to the article. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and please rate, review and share the show. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Booked, on Planning. Thank you.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Jennifer Hiatt

Co-host
Head Shot

Stephanie Rouse, AICP

Co-host