Peter Nichols is an avid outdoorsman and one of Colorado’s leading water law attorneys. It’s not uncommon to see him enter the lobby of his Boulder office at Berg Hill Greenleaf & Ruscitti—a room with stone, hardwoods, and a sharp-dressed receptionist—in wrinkled attorney attire and a pair of worn river sandals. By his own reckoning, being a water law attorney is his sixth career. “Ski bum was my first,” he says. Then came a job with the Colorado General Assembly, positions helping western communities deal with rapid energy development, and water rights consulting work with energy companies themselves. In 2001, Nichols returned to the University of Colorado, where he received his M.P.A. in 1982, to earn his J.D., with a focus on water law. He has been setting precedents in Colorado watersheds ever since.

One of his proudest accomplishments, he says, was a 2013 Colorado Supreme Court case that affirmed the prerogative of conservation groups to encumber water rights in conservation easements, to address ecological and supply problems in Colorado’s rivers. So was giving a presentation that inspired the Colorado Interbasin Compact Committee, which oversees development of the Colorado Water Plan—a historic blueprint for collaborative, statewide water management in the face of rapid population growth. But of all his accomplishments, his work in Colorado’s Arkansas River Basin is the most important, he says. It’s “the crucible” for how the West is going to handle the severe water shortages projected across the rapidly growing Rocky Mountain region.

“The problem began here,” he says, “and if we’re going to solve it, we’re going to have to solve it here.” The problem he is referring to is an urban water acquisition trend known as buy-and-dry.

In a buy-and-dry acquisition, a municipal water utility will meet a city’s growing demand for water by purchasing interests in irrigated agricultural land, permanently fallowing that land, and diverting its water into the taps of city residents. On Colorado’s Arkansas River—where no water is available for new uses and there is a constant call for additional supplies—buy-and-dry tactics have diminished farmland across the basin. In the Lower Arkansas Valley, where the Arkansas River courses through Colorado’s eastern prairie, agricultural communities in some counties have been absolutely devastated.

Nichols says, “the Colorado Water Plan is very focused on eliminating buy-and-dry.” The question is how to do it. “We can’t stop cities from getting the water they need, but maybe we can change the rules [of the game], so it’s not a free-for-all.” The most promising game changer, he believes, is the Super Ditch.

Launch of the Super Ditch

West of the 100th meridian, where supplemental irrigation is required to grow food, irrigation ditches are a common means of delivering water from a river, lake, or reservoir to users along its course. In the Lower Arkansas Valley, there are approximately 20 major mutual irrigation ditch systems. The Super Ditch, however, is not a real ditch. Rather, it’s a corporation—the Lower Arkansas Valley Super Ditch Company, Inc.—set up to provide leased agricultural water to cities as an alternative to the buy-and-dry trend. It represents seven ditch companies operating eight ditches between two reservoirs, the Pueblo and the John Martin.

The Super Ditch began leasing water for the first time this year, through a small pilot project. But it was incorporated in 2008, with the assistance of the Lower Arkansas Valley Water Conservancy District (LAVWCD), a special district established by voters in 2002. Those who voted for the district, whether they owned water or not, were tired of seeing what they considered “their river” diverted to cities more than 100 miles away—some of which lay in completely different river basins. Even urban voters in the City of Pueblo, a steel town on the Arkansas River (population 108,000), sided with rural farmers in the face of economic hardships. “Not one more drop!” became a rallying cry against water leaving the valley.

Nichols serves as special counsel to the LAVWCD and helped the district develop the Super Ditch concept. Inspiration came from California, where the Palo Verde Irrigation District launched a long-term fallowing-leasing program with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) in 2005. The contract between the two entities seeks to supply 27 southern California coastal communities, including San Diego and Los Angeles, with 3.63 million acre-feet of Colorado River water from one ditch over a 35-year period. Participating farmers stop irrigating for a designated period of time, fallow their fields, and receive payment for their water, which bypasses their farms on its journey to MWD customers.

The LAVWCD sought to create a similar project, predicated on a rotational fallowing-leasing concept, but the Super Ditch was a much more sophisticated undertaking. Facilitating work with seven different mutual ditch companies, each with its own board and governance structure, was fraught with challenges. The cumbersome nature of Colorado water law, and the powerful market mechanisms and path dependencies that guide urban water acquisition strategies in the state complicated matters further. Colorado municipalities are hesitant to rely on water leasing, and for good reason. Certainty of supply is critical, and the temporary nature of leasing versus the permanent nature of ownership is unsettling to most urban water providers. What happens if the population grows by 50,000 people, and the leased water those people are relying upon is no longer available—or is sold to a competing water provider?

Nichols tried to develop the Super Ditch concept in ways that addressed these concerns. Supplies from different farmers are pooled by the Super Ditch, and provided to cities under long-term lease contracts. To guarantee that leased supplies are available once the lease period ends, the LAVWCD began working with farmers to place conservation easements on participating farms—protecting them from development and tying the water to the land in perpetuity to ensure future production potential. While enabling temporary transfers, the easements eliminate the possibility of any permanent water severance, diversion, or change in use. In other words: no buy-and-dry.

Conservation easements have protected the fabric of agricultural communities across Colorado and around the nation. An easement-protected land base creates assurances that the future production potential of an agricultural community will be maintained in the face of land conversion threats stemming from urban sprawl, oil and gas development, or municipal buy-and-dry. With the land base protected, related agricultural industries are able to invest in the region with confidence. That, in turn, has a net positive impact on Main Street.

In May 2015, the Super Ditch delivered its first water supplies: five farms on the Catlin Canal provided 500 acre-feet of water to the city of Fountain (pop 27,000), the city of Security (pop 18,000), and the town of Fowler (pop 1,200). Fountain Water Resource Engineer Michael Fink says, “the city took delivery without a hitch,” adding that the long-term success of the program depends on ensuring that the Super Ditch doesn’t advance a supply-side economic model.

Nichols says that’s not a problem. “Cities can lease [from farmers] three in 10 years or 30 percent of the time. They have the responsibility to let farmers know in advance [when they will be leasing]. But for the most part, cities don’t need water in dry years, they need it the year after to refill storage [reservoirs].”

By fallowing one-third of their fields three out of every ten years, farmers “rest” 100 percent of their land once in a ten-year period—a process that supports recommended practices in crop rotation and soil management, while allowing water itself to become a cash crop. Nichols reports that with three-out-of-ten-year crop rotation, a demand of 25,000 acre-feet of water can be met by involving 40 percent of the irrigators. Some farmers believe that as many as 80 percent will want to participate. Participants will certainly be needed: the supply gap in the Arkansas River Basin is projected to grow to 88,000 acre-feet or more by 2050. The litmus test for success will be if large cities responsible for the majority of buy-and-dry activity—Aurora (population 346,000) and Colorado Springs (population 440,000)—sign on to the program. “Municipal acceptance of leasing rather than buying,” Nichols says, “remains the principle challenge.”

From Pioneer to Buy-and-Dry

In the Lower Arkansas Valley, water has divided communities for much of the 20th century. In the 19th century, it divided entire nations. The river here delineated three international boundaries over time: between Spain and the United States following the Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819, which codified the border of the Louisiana Purchase between the two countries; between Mexico and the United States following Mexican independence from Spain in 1821; and between the Republic of Texas and the U.S. before Texas’s annexation in 1845. Two years after the Adams–Onís Treaty was signed, the Santa Fe Trail was established along the river’s course, bringing traders, soldiers, miners, and settlers into Colorado. Those pioneers developed some of Colorado’s earliest settlements—and, with them, water diversion projects along the river’s banks.

The West is dry, and even though the Arkansas River is the Mississippi River’s second longest tributary, it carries very little water in Colorado. Consider how quickly waters in the Lower Arkansas Valley were appropriated. Following the earliest appropriation in 1861, the Homestead Act of 1862 was enacted. More water rights were developed with settlement. By 1874, the last water rights decree still in priority 100 percent of the time (meaning there is always enough water in the river to serve it) was established—two years before Colorado gained statehood in 1876.

Water rights that were appropriated in 1887 are in priority less than 50 percent of the time today. Water rights from 1896 are in priority less than 10 percent of the time. This means that a modern farmer in the Arkansas Valley with an 1896 water right established by his great-grandfather will be able to irrigate just 10 percent of the time given average precipitation. The rest of the time, when there is a “call on the river”—meaning there is not enough water in the system to serve all rights holders—he must desist from diverting water to his fields, so that more senior water-rights holders can use it.

With the Arkansas River overappropriated before the turn of the century, cities began purchasing water from farmers as early as the 1890s. But shortages or conflicts were also addressed through the development of trans-basin diversion projects (which moved water from other river basins into the Arkansas) or storage projects (which sought to capture surplus water behind dams during high flow periods). These projects reached their thresholds in the 1970s. It was then that cities began seriously looking to irrigated lands.

During the 1970s and ’80s, Colorado Springs and Aurora, working with corporate landholders and the City of Pueblo, acquired interests in 55,000 acres of farmland served by the Colorado Canal. The cities subsequently diverted nearly 70,000 acre-feet of water for municipal use, drying up the vast majority of Crowley County. Crowley became the buy-and-dry poster child, and continues to hold that undistinguished title today. Poverty rates exceed 35 percent. Main streets are shadows of the communities that existed there in the mid-20th century. Noxious weed infestation and dust storms are common on dried-up lands. Restoring these farms to native prairie is not only expensive but, in practice, ranges from difficult to impossible.

Today, the losses of irrigated agriculture from water sales in the Lower Arkansas Valley exceed 100,000 acres, representing more than 150,000 acre-feet of water annually. Some farms continue operations by temporarily leasing land or water from the cities they sold to, but those leases will soon expire, advancing even greater losses. In a region that historically irrigated 320,000 acres of farmland, one-third of the tilled ground is now dry, few if any economically viable land use alternatives exist, and people are wondering if a tipping point is coming that will mark the collapse of irrigated agriculture in the area.

“As in much of the West, agriculture is at the heart of this region’s cultural heritage,” says Summer Waters, director of Western Lands and Communities, a joint program of the Sonoran Institute and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “However, we have entered an era in which cities are becoming part of our legacy too. This leaves us with a question that we have to answer collectively: what will the new West look like?”

“Ideally, both cities and agricultural areas will be able to co-exist in the new West,” Waters says. “The key to striking that balance lies in how we manage our water supplies. The Super Ditch concept is an innovative way to build flexibility into our water systems, and flexibility is critical in times when supply is uncertain.”

A Promising Pepper in an Unpromising Place

Mike Bartolo is visibly frustrated. He worries that water transfers will displace agriculture. “We’re losing some of the best growing land in the state,” he says. “These are prime soils that don’t exist in other places. How do you create certainty in the industry [when this is going on]? That’s the question.”

Bartolo, who holds a Ph.D. in plant physiology from the University of Minnesota, is a member of the water faculty at Colorado State University (CSU) and a senior research scientist at CSU’s Arkansas Valley Research Center. He sits on the Super Ditch board of directors, representing the Bessemer Ditch (one of the eight participating ditches), where he is a shareholder. With an 1861 water right, the Bessemer provides one of the most senior and reliable sources of water to farms anywhere in the Lower Arkansas Valley, and it irrigates some of the valley’s best lands. Bartolo is still grieving the 2009 loss of 28 percent of the water in the ditch—sold by farmers he knows to the Pueblo Board of Water Works (PBWW), the utility that provides municipal water to the City of Pueblo.

According to Nichols, there have been occasions when cities strategically approached farmers during the worst of times—when some combination of recession, drought, low commodities prices, overleveraging, or other factors forced their hand. But it is equally true that retiring farmers have assembled collectives to negotiate bulk water sales to cities. The Bessemer Ditch shareholders who sold 5,540 shares to PBWW for $10,150 per share (a share of Bessemer ditch water irrigates approximately one acre) were largely retiring farmers without heirs, responding to falling commodity prices and looking to capitalize on the increasing value of water following the severe drought of 2002. The eventual sale in 2009 netted them more than $56 million. Consider that dry land in this region often sells for less than $300 per acre, and you get a sense of where land values lie: in the water. Wanting to protect other producers and the agricultural fabric of the communities served by the Bessemer, Bartolo tried to convince farmers not to sell—to no avail. “I said, ‘let’s look at other options, at conservation easements, at the Super Ditch,’ but you have to realize how long these sellers had been working on this. Even if they were open to alternatives, my ideas were pie in the sky compared to the cash offer they had in hand.” (The Super Ditch was established but not operational at that time.)

Growers in the region have a great deal of respect for Bartolo. He’s a fourth-generation farmer, credited with developing the Mosco variety of Mirasol green chile pepper—the most popular variety of green chile grown locally and a centerpiece at the Pueblo Chile & Frijoles Festival, which draws more than 100,000 Coloradans each year. Whole Foods recently decided to stock stores with Mosco chiles from the Arkansas Valley rather than Hatch chiles from New Mexico—a blow to the pride of New Mexicans, whose state vegetable is the chile pepper.

Bartolo developed the Mosco chile from seeds his father gathered at the home of Mike’s uncle, Harry Mosco, following his death in 1988. Mike planted the seeds. “One plant I grew was different,” he says. “It had better yield, bigger fruit, and meatier flesh, which made it easier to roast.” Mike made single plant selections beginning with that plant. He isolated the characteristics he wanted and repeated the process, developing the chile over a fifteen-year period.

Many celebrated produce items come out of the Lower Arkansas Valley, Rocky Ford cantaloupes and Mosco chiles being principle among them. Mike has grown them all. Still, when it comes to changing the playing field, as the Super Ditch is looking to do, Mike concedes there is a lot of work ahead. “It has become politically incorrect for cities to buy-and-dry, but that hasn’t stopped other speculators [from playing the role municipal water utilities were playing].” Earlier this year, Pure Cycle, a water and wastewater services company that leases 14,600 acres of land on the Fort Lyon Canal to tenant farmers, sold the farms to an affiliate of C&A Companies and Resource Land Holdings, LLC. C&A is a company with plans to provide Arkansas River water to Front Range cities to the north. “These alternative transfer mechanisms have to be really well defined, and they have to have a history behind them to be able to compete,” Bartolo says. They need to be, he adds, just as adept and quick at providing cash in hand as an outright water sale.

Water as Cash Crop

The value of water out West is only increasing. In the Lower Arkansas Valley, a lot of wealth is embedded in the water farmers own. It seems ironic that communities in possession of such a valuable asset are confronted with poverty and decline. More puzzling still is the fact that farmers are liquidating an asset whose value only continues to grow. Ask any investment advisor, “Would you dispose of an asset predicted to continue increasing in value?” and he or she is likely to say “no . . . unless I had no other choice, or unless there was no other way to see returns from that asset.”

When it comes to water, the problem right now is that there is a strict dichotomy of choices. Farmers who own it have limited means to earn money from it except by: (1) growing food with it and planning for returns based on commodities prices, or (2) selling it and cashing out on its current value. Part of the reason choices are limited has to do with the cumbersome nature of Colorado water law. A lease of water from farm to city can necessitate a change-of-use case in the water courts. A change case involves engineering studies and legal expertise and can run tens of thousands of dollars. The change case proponent must demonstrate to the courts that third-party water rights holders, such as downstream farmers who rely on the same ditch, will not be harmed. If the courts or third parties challenge that premise, the cost of the change case can escalate into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Going through this process for a temporary lease, coupled with cities’ desires to guarantee permanency of supply in the face of growth, is another factor that has historically limited water leasing.

The Super Ditch, through legislation advanced by Nichols in 2013, enabled these checks and balances to take place through a much more efficient administrative process overseen by the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB). Now, Bartolo and Nichols hope to see what happens when farmers have more than two choices. Their belief is that if farmers can retain water ownership, grow food, and realize earnings from “commodity water” at the same time—as they would from other types of assets—the economic outlook for the Lower Arkansas Valley will change.

This outlook is borne out by economic studies. As the Super Ditch concept was gaining steam in 2007, CH2M Hill agricultural economist George Oamek compared different options for farmers: sell water, continue to farm, or continue to farm while participating in a rotational fallowing-leasing program. His projections indicated that, over a 40-year horizon, farmers who sold their water would earn more than farmers who continued to farm, but farmers who continued to farm and participated in the fallowing-leasing program stood to gain the most of all. In a comment to the Pueblo Chieftain following the study, Oamek said that the Super Ditch could ensure the best price for farmers: “In economics, you look at collaboration as a way to draw out a higher price.”

For the same reason, however, the fallowing-leasing concept is a tough sell to large cities.

Following Oamek’s principle of collaboration, cities have been working together to acquire agricultural water supplies at low prices. City skepticism is heightened by inflationary concerns. If water cost is only going to increase, why not purchase supplies now, while prices are low, in order to keep utility rates down?

To address this matter, Nichols looked at different mechanisms for establishing price escalators that would protect buyers and sellers, including:

1. a market-based escalator, based upon other water conveyances;
2. an escalator based upon average municipal water impact fee increases over time;
3. an escalator based upon average municipal water rate increases over time; and
4. a cost-based escalator, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the Producer Price Index (PPI).

The pilot project with Fountain, Security, and Fowler guarantees pricing stability by adjusting the lease price every five years according to the percent change in the Colorado Municipal League’s Index of Colorado Utility Costs.

At $500 an acre-foot, the current Super Ditch lease will earn the five participating farmers a quarter of a million dollars this year in addition to the revenues they will earn from crop production on non-fallowed lands. Some of these crops, such as forage, are low-value crops, and the water lease provides good income in lieu of growing them. Others, like melons and chiles, are high-value crops. Bartolo is excited about the retention of these agricultural revenues, which he thinks will create a ripple effect across the valley’s many communities: “Two acre-feet of water grows an acre of chile—that’s 1,000 bushels,” he says, “which brings in $10,000 to $15,000 in revenue at the farm gate level.”

Although municipal water prices are increasing, considering the shortages the West faces, they’re still low by most counts. Cities have sought to keep prices low by acquiring as much water as they can, as early as they can, while keeping within the bounds of Colorado’s anti-speculation doctrine.

By blurring the lines around the “types” of water that drive prices—both at the tap (utilities prices) and at the head gate (commodities prices)—the Super Ditch may launch a disruptive innovation that could alter the price of water in ways that better reflect Western realities. If farmers retain control of water and lease to cities, prices will adjust according to increasing demand in a field of diversified ownership. That’s a new type of competition in the market, and that’s not a bad thing. Urban growth won’t have to correspond with rural decline. And a glass of water will still be the cheapest beverage to wash down a plate of locally grown chile rellenos.

Scott Campbell is an award-winning conservation planner and consultant whose assembles diverse teams to solve complex environmental, social, and economic problems. Scott was the 2015 Lincoln Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and a joint fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Prior to his fellowship, Scott directed one of the country’s largest land trusts, the William J. Palmer Parks Foundation.

Photograph: John Wark/Airphoto NA

50 años de planificación para la recuperación ante catástrofes

Laurie Johnson es una planificadora urbana internacionalmente reconocida, especializada en la recuperación y gestión de riesgos por catástrofes. Es científica visitante encargada de proyectos en el Centro de Investigaciones de Ingeniería Sísmica del Pacífico de la Universidad de California-Berkeley; es presidente del directorio del Comité Nacional de Asesoramiento de los EE.UU. para la Reducción de Riesgos Sísmicos; y forma parte del comité directivo de la organización Geotechnical Extreme Event Reconnaissance.

Robert Olshansky es profesor y director del Departamento de Planificación Urbana y Regional de la Universidad de Illinois en Urbana-Champaign. Su campo de docencia e investigación gira en torno al uso del suelo y la planificación medioambiental, con énfasis en la planificación ante catástrofes naturales. Ha publicado gran cantidad de material sobre planificación para la recuperación posterior a las catástrofes; planificación y políticas para el riesgo sísmico; planificación de laderas y políticas sobre deslizamiento de tierras; y evaluación del impacto medioambiental.

A lo largo de los años, Laurie y Rob han sido coautores de varias publicaciones, tales como Opportunity in Chaos: Rebuilding After the 1994 Northridge and 1995 Kobe Earthquakes (Una oportunidad en medio del caos: la reconstrucción después de los terremotos de Northridge en 1994 y Kobe en 1995) y Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans (Tan claro como el barro: Planificación para la reconstrucción de Nueva Orleáns). En el presente artículo, los autores hablan sobre su colaboración y su trabajo en un libro y en el informe sobre Enfoque en Políticas de Suelo del Instituto Lincoln de próxima aparición, After Great Disasters: How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery (Después de una gran catástrofe: cómo hicieron seis países para gestionar la recuperación de sus comunidades).

Land Lines: Ustedes dos juntos suman más de 50 años de experiencia trabajando en el campo de la planificación para la recuperación ante catástrofes. ¿Qué los llevó a cada uno a especializarse en esta área?

Robert Olshansky: Siempre he estado interesado en los aspectos de la planificación urbana en las catástrofes: cómo diseñar ciudades que coexistan con estas fuerzas, cómo ser más estratégicos y pragmáticos a la hora de generar políticas de reducción de riesgos, y cómo responder adecuadamente a los acontecimientos naturales cuando ocurren. Sin embargo, hasta mediados de la década de 1990, siempre me enfoqué en la planificación y las políticas previas a las catástrofes.

Todo cambió con los “terremotos gemelos” que tuvieron lugar el 17 de enero de 1994 en Northridge, California, y el 17 de enero de 1995 en Kobe, Japón. Observaba detenidamente el proceso de recuperación en Los Ángeles cuando, al cumplirse un año de la catástrofe de Northridge, el terremoto de Kobe me ayudó a entrever lo que una catástrofe de verdaderas grandes proporciones podría infligir a un área urbana moderna. Un mes más tarde, me encontré con Laurie Johnson en una conferencia, donde descubrimos nuestros intereses en común en aprender algo de estas dos catástrofes, y así comencé este camino.

Pronto me di cuenta de que la recuperación es, paradójicamente, la manera más efectiva de mitigar los riesgos a largo plazo, ya que las catástrofes aumentan la conciencia sobre las fuerzas naturales y ayudan a generar los recursos para atacar el problema. También descubrí que las catástrofes brindan a los planificadores oportunidades únicas para mejorar el entorno urbano. A la inversa, si no estamos preparados para estas oportunidades, podríamos llegar a atascarnos en nuestros nuevos errores por años. Como planificador, veo la recuperación como uno de los mayores desafíos de nuestra profesión, ya que abarca todas las complejidades multidisciplinarias de nuestro campo y nos brinda algunas de las mayores oportunidades para corregir nuestros errores del pasado. Sin embargo, el proceso transcurre en un marco de tiempo muy estrecho, en medio de tensiones y frustraciones de consideración, lo que lo vuelve particularmente difícil de gestionar. Cada nueva situación de recuperación representa un caso de estudio multifacético en sí mismo.

Laurie Johnson: Antes de comenzar a colaborar con Rob, estudié Geofísica y, luego, Planificación urbana. Poco después de graduarme en 1988, me mudé al área de la Bahía de San Francisco, donde trabajé para William Spangle y George Mader, pioneros en la planificación del uso del suelo en áreas geológicamente peligrosas. Cuando ocurrió el terremoto de Loma Prieta en 1989, nos involucramos más activamente con las ciudades del área de la Bahía en la recuperación posterior a la catástrofe y las cuestiones de reconstrucción.

Con el apoyo de la Fundación Nacional de Ciencias, realizamos una de las primeras conferencias de su clase sobre la reconstrucción posterior a un terremoto, que tuvo lugar en la Universidad de Stanford en 1990. Asistieron a la conferencia planificadores de ciudades de todos los Estados Unidos con probabilidad de sufrir terremotos, quienes aprendieron de planificadores que habían liderado las medidas de reconstrucción posteriores a los mayores terremotos urbanos del mundo, ocurridos en Skopje, Macedonia (antigua Yugoslavia, 1963); Managua, Nicaragua (1972); Friuli, Italia (1976); El Asnam, Argelia (1980); Ciudad de México (1985); y Armenia (1988). Fue precisamente durante esos años cuando comencé a interesarme por la reconstrucción de las comunidades, particularmente por cómo mejorar la capacidad de los gobiernos municipales para gestionar y liderar la recuperación posterior a una catástrofe.

LL: Laurie, usted tiene un doctorado en Informática por la Universidad de Kioto. ¿Por qué decidió ir a estudiar a ese lugar?

LJ: Ya había intentado comenzar con un trabajo de doctorado un par de veces a comienzos de mi carrera; sin embargo, finalmente las estrellas se alinearon en 2006, cuando el profesor Haruo Hayashi me invitó a unirme al centro de investigación de catástrofes que él lideraba en la Universidad de Kioto. Me retrasé nuevamente cuando fui a trabajar con el plan de recuperación posterior a Katrina durante el período 2006–2007. No obstante, resultó que la experiencia de recuperación en Nueva Orleáns ofreció una oportunidad de intercambio enriquecedor con colegas japoneses que habían estado profundamente involucrados en la recuperación de Kobe. Al principio, mi idea era comparar los enfoques que los Estados Unidos y Japón tenían sobre la gestión de la recuperación ante catástrofes de gran escala y utilizar este análisis para mi tesis, pero finalmente realicé un análisis comparativo de la gestión de recuperación en tres ciudades de los Estados Unidos: Grand Forks (Dakota del Norte), Los Ángeles (California) y Nueva Orleáns (Louisiana). Realmente valoré la oportunidad que tuve de reflexionar sobre los distintos enfoques adoptados por los Estados Unidos con mis colegas de Japón, quienes, debido a que provenían de un sistema de gobierno diferente, me ayudaron a identificar varios elementos conflictivos derivados de las políticas y otros vacíos que, de otra manera, no hubiera podido apreciar.

LL: Rob, después del huracán Katrina, usted y Timothy Green llevaron a cabo una investigación para el Instituto Lincoln sobre el programa Road Home, que entregó más de 8 mil millones de dólares a propietarios de viviendas en Nueva Orleáns para reparar sus hogares o vendérselos al estado. En esta investigación, ustedes observaron que los residentes de las áreas más inundadas eran los que con mayor probabilidad se mudarían de esas zonas (ver Green y Olshansky, “Homeowner Decisions, Land Banking, and Land Use Change in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina”, 2009). ¿Sabe usted si ese patrón (que sugiere una respuesta muy racional ante el riesgo) ha permanecido en el tiempo?

RO: De hecho, observamos que la profundidad de la inundación era la variable que mayor correlación tenía con la decisión de vender y mudarse. El valor de la vivienda, los ingresos, la raza y los años de ocupación no fueron factores significativos, al menos a la escala de los datos que manejamos. Este es un resultado positivo en términos de políticas destinadas a las inundaciones y, ciertamente, es mejor que haber descubierto que la profundidad de la inundación no tenía efecto alguno sobre el comportamiento de los propietarios. Sin embargo, aún no queda claro si los patrones reales de reconstrucción han cambiado, ya que los datos sencillamente no están disponibles. No obstante, visualmente, las áreas de la ciudad que presentan un menor nivel de reconstrucción se encuentran, generalmente, en las zonas más bajas, donde se produjo la mayor cantidad de daños. Así que puedo responder que sí: esta situación parece reflejar una respuesta racional ante el riesgo de inundación.

Por otro lado, los motivos de dicha respuesta pueden variar entre los diferentes grupos de ingresos. Creo que muchos de los lotes en zonas bajas pero de altos ingresos fueron adquiridos posteriormente por compradores que construyeron viviendas en ellos, mientras que muchos propietarios de bajos ingresos que intentaron reconstruir sus hogares no tuvieron los recursos económicos para hacerlo. Por lo tanto, para poder afirmar que la mayoría de las personas se comportó de manera “racional” frente al riesgo de inundación deberíamos tener en cuenta un contexto más amplio. Además, aunque la profundidad de la inundación tuvo una correlación positiva con la decisión de vender, la mayoría de los propietarios de viviendas en las zonas más inundadas de la ciudad (del 52 por ciento al 79 por ciento, dependiendo del lugar) optaron aun así por permanecer en el lugar y reconstruir sus hogares.

LL: ¿Cuáles son los desafíos que enfrentan los programas de compra de propiedades, como Road Home, y otras estrategias de reubicación destinadas a evitar la recurrencia de pérdidas catastróficas?

LJ: En los Estados Unidos, la práctica de la compra de propiedades en terrenos inundables posterior a una catástrofe está bastante establecida. Los programas de compra voluntarios están dirigidos por lo general a hogares unifamiliares que se encuentran dañados en más del 50 por ciento a raíz de una inundación, o que se encuentran dentro de la zona inundable con proyección de 100 años establecida por la Agencia Federal de Gestión de Emergencias (FEMA). Sin embargo, las fuentes federales de financiamiento para catástrofes, como el programa de subsidios para la mitigación de riesgos de FEMA, también requieren que las áreas en las que se encuentran las viviendas que se comprarán permanezcan como espacios abiertos o tengan algún otro uso sin ocupación. De esta manera, si las comunidades inundadas tienen pocas viviendas disponibles o pocas oportunidades para construir en terrenos baldíos, tanto los precios de alquiler como de venta de las viviendas en esa área pueden aumentar de manera considerable, y los residentes pueden tomar la decisión de mudarse, lo que representaría un freno a las economías municipales.

Por su propia naturaleza, las grandes catástrofes trastornan los sistemas físicos, sociales, económicos e institucionales de las comunidades a las que afectan. Un programa de compra de propiedades de gran alcance puede crear otra ola de trastornos que se propague a todos estos sistemas si no se diseña y gestiona de manera adecuada. En tiempos de normalidad, dichos sistemas no se encuentran bajo tal estrés ni están tan estrechamente relacionados, por lo que los trastornos causados por un proyecto de redesarrollo o abandono del mismo generalmente no son tan graves como en los tiempos de catástrofe.

El caso de Grand Forks, en Dakota del Norte, es uno de los mejores ejemplos de planificación y administración integral de la recuperación, tanto de lugares como de personas. Después de la inundación de 1997, la ciudad trabajó junto con socios federales y estatales y con el sector privado con el fin de adquirir terrenos e instalar infraestructura y servicios para un nuevo barrio residencial que se construiría en tierras más altas, y los propietarios de las viviendas sujetas a compra tuvieron la prioridad de reubicarse en dicho barrio. Esto ayudó a mantener a los residentes dentro de la comunidad y estabilizar los precios de las viviendas. Grand Forks también se asoció a su municipio vecino, East Grand Forks, en Minnesota, así como también a agencias federales y estatales, para agregar más de 890 hectáreas de suelo que se obtuvieron mediante la compra de viviendas y los proyectos de protección de diques. La posterior construcción de áreas verdes permanentes a lo largo del río Rojo ha posibilitado un cambio a mejor en los centros administrativos y económicos de ambas ciudades. Sin embargo, debo enfatizar que esta transformación de ninguna manera fue fácil: llevó más de 10 años lograrla, y requirió un liderazgo, una colaboración y un apoyo sostenidos.

LL: Laurie y Rob, el Instituto Lincoln ha estado preocupado durante algunos años por dos fuerzas a nivel mundial: el cambio climático y la urbanización. ¿Es probable que los acontecimientos climáticos y los desarrollos urbanos en lugares de riesgo aumenten la exposición a las catástrofes? ¿Estamos preparados para enfrentar esto?

RO: Las catástrofes, particularmente las que se dan en las áreas costeras, actualmente representan un problema internacional importante, independientemente de estas dos fuerzas impulsoras. Es un problema actual, no futuro. Muchas de las ciudades más pobladas en todo el mundo son puertos en deltas fluviales o estuarios, y muchos sectores de estas ciudades se encuentran por debajo del nivel del mar. Además, muchas personas viven en islas barrera costeras. Estas zonas costeras son azotadas por grandes tormentas varias veces en un siglo. Después de cada una de estas tormentas, aprendemos importantes lecciones que luego olvidamos rápidamente. Mientras tanto, las ciudades de todo el mundo están creciendo (tanto en población como en una mayor urbanización), lo que empeora el problema, ya que muchas más personas están expuestas, gran parte del crecimiento urbano se da en las zonas más bajas y, en muchas ciudades, la construcción rápida y densa es de baja calidad. Aunque el cambio climático exacerba toda esta situación, permítanme utilizar el cambio climático como un signo de exclamación que cierra este argumento, en lugar de abrirlo. Así que mi respuesta es no: la mayoría de los lugares no están preparados adecuadamente, ni para las tormentas que experimentamos actualmente ni para la creciente cantidad de marejadas ciclónicas costeras que se esperan en el futuro.

LL: Ustedes han concluido recientemente un importante proyecto de investigación para el Instituto Lincoln, partiendo de casos de estudio relacionados con la recuperación ante catástrofes en seis países. ¿Podrían comentarnos algo acerca de estos casos y la razón por la que los seleccionaron?

RO: Nos enfocamos en las medidas de recuperación implementadas en China, India, Indonesia, Japón, Nueva Zelanda y los Estados Unidos. El punto que tienen en común estos casos es que se trató de catástrofes de grandes proporciones que afectaron gravemente las áreas urbanas, y todos ellos ofrecen lecciones que resultan relevantes para otros países, particularmente los Estados Unidos. Con excepción de China, todos los países con los que trabajamos poseen instituciones democráticas, en las que participan una gran variedad de organizaciones gubernamentales y no gubernamentales para llevar a cabo la recuperación. Mi interés particular tenía que ver con los casos de reubicación, que siempre son difíciles de lograr en sociedades democráticas. Elegimos el terremoto de 2001 en Gujarat, India, debido al proceso de readjuste de suelo que llevaron a cabo y la cantidad de daños que provocó en las áreas rurales, a una escala similar a la de la zona central de los Estados Unidos. India es también un caso interesante porque sus antecedentes de catástrofes ilustran un proceso de aprendizaje en cuanto a las políticas, en un país de grandes proporciones sujeto al riesgo de catástrofes. Indonesia es interesante por la misma razón: probablemente es el mejor ejemplo de una evolución rápida de las políticas y la práctica como resultado del aprendizaje obtenido de muchísimas catástrofes. Además, el terremoto y el tsunami ocurridos en 2004 en Banda Aceh, en medio de un conflicto armado, es una de las mayores catástrofes sufridas en la historia moderna. Al momento de ocurrir esta catástrofe, decidimos investigar el tsunami en el océano Índico, ya que nos proporcionaba una oportunidad para observar cómo se llevaban a cabo medidas de recuperación en varios países simultáneamente. En China, nos atrajo la gran escala del terremoto ocurrido en 2008 en la provincia de Sichuan y su relación con los procesos continuos de urbanización y cambios en el uso del suelo.

LJ: Tanto Rob como yo ya habíamos escrito numerosos trabajos sobre la planificación de la recuperación ante catástrofes de muchas ciudades de los Estados Unidos y Japón. Por lo tanto, para este nuevo libro, decidimos adoptar un punto de vista más amplio de los enfoques de ambos países acerca de la gestión de la recuperación. Con respecto a los Estados Unidos, abordamos la evolución de las políticas de recuperación posteriores a los ataques al World Trade Center, al huracán Katrina y al huracán Sandy; todos estos casos involucraban una considerable cantidad de fondos federales y la centralización de las autoridades federales y estatales. En el caso de Japón, consideramos brevemente la reconstrucción de Tokio después del terremoto y el incendio que devastaron la ciudad en 1923, los cuales marcaron a fuego tanto la filosofía como las políticas de gestión de catástrofes del país. Analizamos, además, de qué manera esta experiencia influyó en el enfoque adoptado por el gobierno para financiar y gestionar la recuperación posterior al terremoto de 1995 y al terremoto y el tsunami de 2011.

En nuestro libro también revisamos la recuperación ante catástrofes adoptada en Christchurch, Nueva Zelanda, a raíz de la devastadora serie de terremotos ocurridos entre 2010 y 2011, que causaron una continua y generalizada licuación del suelo, desprendimientos de rocas y hundimiento del suelo. Al investigar acerca de este caso de estudio, recordé cuál había sido mi primera pasión profesional: encontrar distintos enfoques en la planificación del uso del suelo en áreas geológicamente peligrosas. El gobierno de Nueva Zelanda ha adoptado un liderazgo muy activo en la recuperación, lo que convierte a este país en un muy buen caso de estudio para compararlo con otros enfoques nacionales que describimos en el libro.

LL: Teniendo en cuenta estos casos de estudio, ¿cuáles son los aspectos clave que pueden mejorar los planificadores y gestores de políticas con el fin de prepararse para la recuperación después de una catástrofe?

RO: En cada uno de estos casos, los gobiernos enfrentaron una gran incertidumbre y tuvieron que equilibrar las tensiones entre restaurar rápidamente lo que ya existía y realizar mejoras de forma deliberada. Los planificadores y gestores de políticas deben reducir dicha incertidumbre mediante la búsqueda de diferentes formas de financiamiento, la elaboración de procedimientos claros, la simplificación de procesos burocráticos, la divulgación de información al público y la participación de todas las partes interesadas, con el fin de brindar fundamentos para tomar buenas decisiones y diseñar buenas políticas. En el libro proporcionamos varias recomendaciones que reflejan ciertos principios en común: prioridad de la información, participación de las partes interesadas y transparencia.

LJ: La recuperación después de una catástrofe de grandes proporciones siempre es compleja y nunca es lo suficientemente rápida para los residentes afectados. Sin embargo, este proceso puede mejorarse estableciendo expectativas realistas desde el principio de una catástrofe y trabajando para restaurar las comunidades y sus economías de manera rápida y equitativa, mediante la convocatoria de todas las partes interesadas (residentes, comerciantes, propietarios, aseguradoras, empresas de servicios públicos, etc.) para que participen en el proceso. De esta manera, los gobiernos pueden resolver los problemas preexistentes, garantizar la gobernabilidad de la recuperación a largo plazo y reducir el riesgo de futuras catástrofes.

RO: No obstante, antes que pretender una recuperación inteligente, deberíamos pensar de antemano las estrategias para gestionar futuras catástrofes. Esta es una buena manera de mejorar la resiliencia comunitaria: la capacidad de sobrevivir, adaptarse y recuperarse de acontecimientos extremos.

Fotografía: Ikuo Kobayashi

50 Years of Disaster Recovery Planning

Laurie Johnson is an internationally recognized urban planner who specializes in disaster recovery and catastrophe risk management. She is a visiting project scientist at the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center at the University of California-Berkeley, chairs the U.S. National Advisory Committee for Earthquake Hazards Reduction, and serves on the steering committee of the Geotechnical Extreme Event Reconnaissance organization.

Robert Olshansky is professor and head of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His teaching and research cover land use and environmental planning, with an emphasis on planning for natural hazards. He has published extensively on post-disaster recovery planning, planning and policy for earthquake risks, hillside planning and landslide policy, and environmental impact assessment.

Over the years, Laurie and Rob have coauthored several publications, including Opportunity in Chaos: Rebuilding After the 1994 Northridge and 1995 Kobe Earthquakes and Clear as Mud: Planning for the Rebuilding of New Orleans. In this article, they discuss their collaboration and their work on a forthcoming Lincoln Institute book and Policy Focus Report, After Great Disasters: How Six Countries Managed Community Recovery.

LAND LINES: Together, the two of you have more than 50 years of experience working in the field of disaster recovery planning. What led each of you into this specialty?

Robert Olshansky: I have always been interested in the urban planning aspects of disasters—how to design cities to coexist with these forces, how to be more strategic and pragmatic in creating policies to reduce risks, and how to respond appropriately to natural events when they occur. But up until the mid-1990s, my focus was always on pre-disaster planning and policy.

All that changed after the twin January 17 earthquakes, in 1994 in Northridge, California, and in 1995 in Kobe, Japan. I was closely observing the recovery process in Los Angeles, when, on the first anniversary of the Northridge disaster, the Kobe earthquake provided a glimpse of what a truly large event could do to a modern urban area. A month later, I ran into Laurie Johnson at a conference, where we discovered common interests in learning from these two events, and my path was set.

I soon realized that recovery is, paradoxically, the most effective path for long-term hazard mitigation, because disasters increase awareness of natural forces and bring resources to bear on the problem. I also discovered that disasters provide planners with unusual opportunities for urban betterment. Conversely, if we are not prepared for these opportunities, we might find ourselves stuck with our new mistakes for years. As a planner, I see recovery as one of our profession’s greatest challenges. It encompasses all the multidisciplinary complexities of our field, and provides some of our greatest opportunities to right past wrongs. But the process transpires in a compressed time frame amid considerable tensions and frustration, which makes it particularly hard to manage. Each new recovery situation is a multifaceted case study of its own.

Laurie Johnson: Before Rob and I began collaborating, I studied geophysics and then urban planning. Shortly after graduation in 1988, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work for William Spangle and George Mader, pioneers in land use planning for geologically hazardous areas. When the Loma Prieta earthquake struck in 1989, we became more actively engaged with Bay Area cities on post-disaster recovery and rebuilding issues.

With support from the National Science Foundation, we hosted one of the first-of-its-kind conferences on rebuilding after earthquakes, at Stanford University in 1990. Planners from cities prone to earthquakes across the United States came to learn from planners who led rebuilding efforts following some of the world’s major urban earthquakes, in Skopje, Macedonia (then Yugoslavia, 1963); Managua, Nicaragua (1972); Friuli, Italy (1976); El Asnam, Algeria (1980); Mexico City (1985); and Armenia (1988). It was in those years that I became interested in rebuilding communities—and particularly in enhancing local government capacity to manage and lead post-disaster recovery.

LL: Laurie, you have a doctorate degree in informatics from Kyoto University. Why did you decide to go there to study?

LJ: I had tried to start work on a doctorate a couple of times earlier in my career, but in 2006 the stars finally aligned when Professor Haruo Hayashi invited me to join his disaster research center at Kyoto University. I was delayed again when I went to work on the post-Katrina recovery plan in 2006–2007. But it turned out that the New Orleans recovery experience offered an opportunity for a richer exchange with Japanese colleagues who had been deeply involved in Kobe’s recovery. I initially hoped to compare the U.S. and Japanese approaches to large-scale disaster recovery management for my dissertation, but eventually settled on doing a comparative analysis of recovery management in three U.S. cities: Grand Forks, North Dakota; Los Angeles, California; and New Orleans, Louisiana. I really valued the opportunity to reflect on the U.S. approaches with my Japanese colleagues, who, coming from a different governance system, helped me to see many elements of conflicting policy and gaps that I may not have appreciated otherwise.

LL: Rob, after Hurricane Katrina, you and Timothy Green conducted research for the Lincoln Institute on the Road Home Program, which dispensed more than $8 billion to New Orleans home owners to either repair their homes or sell them to the state. You found that residents in the worst-flooded areas were most likely to move away (see Green and Olshansky, “Homeowner Decisions, Land Banking, and Land Use Change in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina,” 2009). Do you know if that pattern, which suggests a very rational response to risk, has held up over time?

RO: We did find that flood depth was the variable most correlated with the decision to sell and move. Home value, income, race, and years of occupancy were not significant factors, at least at the scale of our data. This is a positive finding in terms of flood policy, and it is certainly better than finding that flood depth had no effect at all on home owner behavior. But whether actual reconstruction patterns have changed is unclear, because the data are simply not available. Visually, however, the parts of the city with the least rebuilding are generally at the lowest elevations, where the most damage occurred. So, yes, this does appear to reflect a rational response to flood risk.

But the reasons for that response may vary among different income groups. I suspect that many low-lying lots in the wealthier areas were subsequently acquired by buyers who built homes on them, whereas many lower-income owners who intended to rebuild were not financially able to do so. So the assertion that most people behaved “rationally” in the face of flood risk needs to be seen in a broader context. Furthermore, although flood depth was positively correlated with the decision to sell, the majority of home owners in the most flooded parts of the city—52 to 79 percent, depending on location—still opted to stay and rebuild.

LL: What are the challenges faced by buyout programs like the Road Home Program and other relocation strategies aimed at avoiding repeated catastrophic losses?

LJ: In the United States, the practice of post-disaster floodplain buyouts is fairly well established. Voluntary buyout programs typically target single-family homes that are more than 50 percent damaged by flood or within the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s 100-year flood zone. But federal post-disaster funding streams, like FEMA’s hazard mitigation grant program, also require that the buyout areas remain as open space or have some other nonoccupied use. Thus, if flooded communities have few available houses or infill opportunities, both rental and for-sale housing prices in the area may rise sharply and residents may decide to move away, creating a drag on local economies.

By their very nature, large disasters disrupt the physical, social, economic, and institutional systems of the communities affected. A major buyout program can create another wave of disruption that ripples through all these systems if it’s not designed and managed properly. In normal times, these systems are not as stressed or tightly coupled, so the disruption caused by a land redevelopment or retreat project is typically not as acute as in post-disaster times.

Grand Forks, North Dakota, provides one of the better examples of comprehensive recovery planning and stewardship of both people and place. After the 1997 flood, the city worked with federal and state partners and the private sector to acquire land and install infrastructure and services for a new residential neighborhood on higher ground, and they gave priority to the buyout property owners to relocate there. This helped to keep residents in the community and stabilize housing prices. Grand Forks also partnered with its neighbor, East Grand Forks, Minnesota, as well as federal and state agencies, to aggregate more than 2,200 acres of land obtained through the buyouts and levee protection projects. Subsequent construction of a permanent greenway along the Red River has helped change the downtowns of both cities and their economies for the better. But I should emphasize that this transformation was by no means easy. It took over a decade to accomplish, requiring sustained leadership, collaboration, and support.

LL: Laurie and Rob, the Lincoln Institute has been concerned for some years with two global forces: climate change and urbanization. Are climate events and urban development in hazardous locations likely to increase exposure to disasters? Are we prepared to deal with this?

RO: Disasters, particularly in coastal areas, are a significant international problem right now, regardless of these driving forces. This is a present-day problem, not a future problem. Many of the world’s most populated cities are ports on river deltas or estuaries, and many parts of these cities are below sea level. Many people also live on coastal barrier islands. Large storms strike each of these coastal areas several times each century, and after each storm we learn important lessons that we quickly forget. Meanwhile, cities worldwide are growing through both population growth and increasing urbanization. This makes the problem worse because more people are exposed, much of the urban growth occurs in the lowest places, and rapid, dense construction in many cities is of low quality. Although climate change exacerbates all of this, I would use climate change as the exclamation point to this argument rather than its starting point. So no, most places are not well prepared for either present-day storms or for the elevated number of coastal storm surges expected in the future.

LL: The two of you have just finished work on a major research project for Lincoln based on case studies of disaster recovery in six countries. Tell us about the cases you selected and why you chose them.

RO: We focused on recovery efforts in China, India, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States. The common thread is that these were extremely large disasters that severely affected urban areas, and they offer lessons that are relevant for other countries, particularly the United States. With the exception of China, the countries we focused on have democratic institutions, in which a variety of governmental and nongovernmental organizations participate in carrying out recovery. I was especially interested in cases of relocation, which are always difficult to accomplish in democratic societies. We chose the 2001 Gujarat earthquake in India both because of the land readjustment process and because of the widespread damage in rural areas similar in scale to the central United States. India is also of interest because its history of disasters illustrates a process of policy learning over time in a large and hazard-prone country. Indonesia is of interest for the same reason—it is probably the best example of rapid evolution of policy and practice as a result of learning from multiple disasters. In addition, the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in Banda Aceh, occurring in the midst of armed conflict, is one of the greatest disasters in modern history. At the time it occurred, we decided to investigate the Indian Ocean tsunami, because it provided an opportunity to view recovery efforts taking place simultaneously in several countries. In China, we were drawn to the immense scale of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province and its relationship to ongoing processes of urbanization and land use change.

LJ: Rob and I had already written extensively about post-disaster recovery planning in many U.S. and Japanese cities. So, for this book, we decided to take a longer view of both countries’ approaches to recovery management. In the United States, we look at the evolution of recovery policy following the World Trade Center attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Sandy—all of which involved considerable federal funding and a centralization of federal and state authority. For Japan, we look briefly at the rebuilding of Tokyo after the devastating earthquake and fire of 1923, which made an indelible mark on the country’s disaster management philosophy and policy, and how that experience influenced the government’s approach to funding and managing recovery from the 1995 earthquake and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Our book also includes a look at disaster recovery in Christchurch, New Zealand, following the devastating sequence of earthquakes in 2010–2011 that caused repeated and widespread liquefaction, rockfalls, and ground subsidence. Researching this case study brought me back to my original professional passion: land use planning approaches in geologically hazardous areas. New Zealand’s government has taken a very active leadership role in the recovery, which provides a very good case for comparison with other national approaches that we describe.

LL: Drawing on these case studies, what are some of the key things planners and policy makers can do to better prepare for recovery after disaster strikes?

RO: In each of the cases, governments faced considerable uncertainty and had to balance the tensions between quickly restoring what was there before and deliberately creating betterment. Planners and policy makers need to reduce this uncertainty by finding funds, establishing clear procedures, streamlining bureaucratic processes, providing public information, and involving all stakeholders so that they can help inform good decision making and policy design. We provide several recommendations in the book that reflect a common set of principles: primacy of information, stakeholder involvement, and transparency.

LJ: Recovery after a major disaster is always complex and never fast enough for affected residents. However, the process can be improved by setting realistic expectations at the outset and by working to restore communities and economies quickly and equitably, empowering the full range of stakeholders—residents, businesses, land owners, insurers, utilities, and others—to participate in the process. In this way, governments can resolve preexisting problems, ensure governance for recovery over the long term, and reduce the risk of future disasters.

RO: Even better than smart recovery, however, is thinking ahead about strategies to manage future disasters. This is a good way to improve community resilience—the ability to survive, adapt, and recover from extreme events.

Photograph: Ikuo Kobayashi