Why Climate Resiliency Is About More Than Emergency Preparation & Response
What Hurricane Helene and systems thinking can teach outdoor activity programs about disaster planning and community resilience.
October 9, 2024 – By Stuart Slay and Emily Ten Eyck
Before Helene, Asheville was considered a climate haven. Now, it is a poster child for the climate crisis.
The storm is attributable to climate change. In fact, researchers estimate that Helene was 20 times more likely due to global warming (Risser et al., 2024). Compared to similar storms from a generation ago, Helene produced 50% more rain and 7 times stronger winds (Risser et al., 2024; Faranda, 2024).
Over three days, Helene dumped 40 trillion gallons of water across the Southeastern US– that’s as much water as all of Lake Tahoe. Appalachian mountain communities experienced the worst of it, as rivers and drainages swelled at an exponential rate due to water runoff from higher elevations. Homes, businesses, roads, highways, and entire communities were washed away.
Climate Change Risks and Outdoor Programs
The scope of impact across the region is unprecedented (Davis, 2024). For the outdoor programming sector, Hurricane Helene exemplifies hurricane and flood disasters in the U.S., just like the 2019/20 Black Summer exemplified wildfire disasters in Australia.
These two landmark events illustrate the urgency for climate resiliency in our sector.
That summer’s events in Australia were catastrophic for some programs, in which millions of public lands and operating areas were scorched. Schools and other programming partners closed, critical infrastructure like power, communications, and road access went down, and homes, businesses, and facilities were lost. Air quality issues radiated beyond southeast Australia as the worst air quality in the world was recorded and vulnerable groups were advised to stay indoors (AIDR, 2020).
New South Wales’ barren landscape after 19/20 season
Screenshot from Geospatial Intelligence.
Power outages across southeast after Helene
Screenshot from NOAA.
These types of unprecedented and climate-induced disasters effect entire communities and economies. They are also detrimental to the outdoor activity sector which is small, operates on thin financial margins, and relies heavily on part-time and seasonal staff (Quay et al., 2020).
Lessons from modern safety science and systems thinking can help us learn from large-scale catastrophic events. For example, we know that emergent risks, or, the risks that are introduced when two tasks or events interact with one another, will occur– like disturbed yellow jacket nests or the likelihood of staffing issues in future programming seasons (Leonard, 2021).
Leverage Points: What we can learn from systems thinking
In processing Helene with my colleague and Asheville resident, Emily Ten Eyck, Donella Meadows’ (1999) leverage points come to mind.
Meadows’ leverage point number two is about the goals of the system. Changing a system’s goals is the second most impactful place in the system to intervene. It is also the second hardest (the first is the paradigm from which the system originates, FYI).
Because a system will always behave as it is designed, thoughtful examination and refining its design is required. This includes aspects such as the goals, rules, information flows, and feedback loops, for example. Leveraging these parts of the system yields significant results toward systems change.
Organizational Resiliency Is Community Resiliency
Catastrophic events that disrupt and wipe out society’s infrastructure and support systems trump any single organization’s interests or needs. It’s tough to think about organizational resiliency when these types of events occur. Organizations within these impact zones can render its resources and emergency plans useless.
The best stories coming out of Asheville and Appalachia from our sector are about outdoor programs that are able to contribute to community efforts and wellbeing. For example, stories of program staff who used their backcountry navigation and climbing skills to do wellness checks in their community are surfacing, as are stories of staff who were able to conduct hasty searches for missing people and recovery operations, are being shared throughout our networks. Other programs are organizing to support community grieving and processing. Programs outside the region are organizing and contributing in a variety of ways, including sending epinephrine to rescuers to help with the influx of bees and wasps.
Outdoor activity programs are better equipped than many other types of organizations to support community resilience when natural disasters hit. Programs’ staff regularly teach and practice resilience, they have rescue and first aid skills, and they have logistical know-how and access to programs’ resources and supplies.
Many programs impacted by Helene are demonstrating that effective emergency response goes beyond the organization. When society’s infrastructure and supports crumble, the goals of an organization’s emergency response system change to prioritize community response and resilience.
For example, emerging from the catastrophic bushfires of the Black Summer and the pandemic, Outward Bound Australia shifted its organizational goals to promote climate resiliency among the led outdoor activity community by establishing the National Centre for Risk and Outdoor Readiness (Nat-CORR). PIVOTPoint WNC is another example from Helene working with other programs in the region to support their local community’s mental health. There are no doubt many others.
Much of our sector’s work on disaster preparation is about self-sufficiency. In our collective realizing that the scope of the environmental hazards programs are prepared to handle is broadening, we’re seeing that we can, and perhaps should, shift the goals of our emergency systems to include community sufficiency– both as receivers and helpers.
Planning with Local Partners
In our recent climate resiliency survey among outdoor activity programs (Jackson et al., 2024), many respondents asked where they should go to get information and who they should rely on.
The stories coming out of Helene are helping to answer that question. Programming organizations should connect with their local authorities and community partners about what to expect and how they can partner to support rescue and recovery efforts immediately following a fire, storm, or flood.
A notable trait across many natural disaster case studies is that community partners are the first to respond– not state or federal agencies.
A central tenant of crisis management is planning and practice. Perhaps the most useful conversation I had to prepare myself to assume command of a critical incident was a conversation with an NPS Incident Commander. Simply asking, “how do you expect us to work together in the event our program has a critical incident in a national park?” opened the door to a host of insights. A few years later and with some experience under my belt, everything that NPS incident commander said has been exactly right.
As a former camp director, Emily regularly held pre-season meetings with local agencies to familiarize community partners with the facility and its programs, in the event an evacuation was needed out of the remote venue. In turn, the camp regularly supported search and rescue missions in the nearby wilderness area. This planned and practiced relationship among partners contributed to the ecosystem of community resilience.
Programs’ Impact on Local Communities
Community partnership and impact is not a new or revolutionary idea in outdoor programming. My research from grad school is about culture and risk. In that work, we posit that programs likely contribute more risk to local communities than the communities pose to programmatic risks.
For example, one impactful story told at a WRMC I attended years ago described, after an earthquake in Nepal, local evacuation resources were taken from the local community to evacuate a travel programming group.
Storms like Helene are abnormal, and before the storm Appalachia floods was considered an irrelevant risk. However, climate scientists are warning that more like Helene are coming, and we’re slowly accepting that more fire seasons like the Black Summer are here to stay.
These risks have been considered abnormal and therefore irrelevant. However, post-Helene, these climate anomalies should be considered within the range of possible and normal risks.
Key parts of an organizational response plan should include the type of impact we want and can have on local communities. Like any good emergency response plan, these details should be discussed and shared with community partners and local authorities. This work is an extension of our programs’ mission and contribution to the betterment of society.
We have yet to see what is in store for Asheville-based programs and others in the region, and how Helene will reshape the sector.
As we are becoming more aware and concerned about the complexities and effects of climate change on our sector, utilizing leverage points to help reshape our plans and systems will help programs prepare for the next disaster. Climate resiliency shouldn’t only be about organizational resiliency, but about community resiliency, too.
Changing the goals of the system is a meaningful leverage point toward a more climate and community resilient sector. By becoming more resilient, mission-driven outdoor programs will continue to serve as sources of good in their local communities and society.
References
Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience (AIDR; 2020). Major Incidents Report 2019-2020. Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience. Accessed Oct. 7, 2024.
Davis, C. (2024). Rapid Reaction: Historic Flooding Follows Helene in Western NC. North Carolina State Climate Office. Accessed Oct. 7, 2024.
Faranda, Alvarez-Castro, Pons, Alberti, and Coppola. (30 Sept. 2024). Heavy precipitation and strong winds in Hurricane Helene mostly strengthened by human-driven climate change. Climameter. Accessed Oct. 7, 2024.
Jackson, J., Slay, S., Tarter, S. (2024). Present-day Impact of Climate Change on Outdoor Organizations (in press). Journal of Wilderness and Environmental Medicine.
Leonard AM, Ewert AW, Lieberman-Raridon K, et al. (2021). Outdoor Adventure and Experiential Education and COVID-19: What Have We Learned? Journal of Experiential Education. 2022;45(3):233-255. http://doi/10.1177/10538259211050762
Meadows, D. (1999) Leverage Points: Places to intervene in a system. The Sustainability Institute. Hartland, VT.
Quay, J., Gray, T., Thomas, G., Allen-Craig, S., Asfeldt, M., Andkjaer, S., Beames, S., Cosgriff, M., Dyment, J., Higgins, P., Ho, S., Leather, M., Mitten, D., Morse, M., Neill, J., North, C., Passy, R., Pedersen-Gurholt, K., Polley, S., … Foley, D. (2020). What future/s for outdoor and environmental education in a world that has contended with COVID-19? Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education, 23(2), 93–117. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42322-020-00059-2
Risser, North, and Wehner. (2024). Climate change may have caused as much as 50% more rainfall during Hurricane Helene in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas: A provisional Hurricane Helene rainfall climate change attribution statement. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Accessed Oct. 6, 2024.
Interested in learning more about climate resiliency and risk management for outdoor programs? Subscribe to my newsletter.
More importantly, donate to local relief efforts across Appalachia.
