By Guillermo Accame, Industry Advisor to NCAR

Why do I think the creation of C3WE was genius?  To answer that, let’s consider how good ideas cross the line and become genius.  We can all agree that high intelligence, like an IQ over 140, is the price of admission, but what is intelligence without an education?  So add lots of highly intelligent scientists with advanced degrees, like you find at NCAR, and now you have the basic building blocks to produce a genius idea.

By Rhiannan Price, Digital Globe

By Emily Jack-Scott, Aspen Global Change Institute, and Susan Moser Research Consultancy

The term ‘resilience’ has been adopted by many different disciplines in recent years to embody many different meanings and objectives. The use of the term ‘resilience’ in published literature has increased tenfold in the last decade alone, begging the question:

What is resilience?

By Rob Pressly, Colorado Resiliency and Recovery Office

The Colorado Resiliency and Recovery Office, and C3WE partner, is pleased to announce the release of three new recovery and resiliency resources.

By Abad Chabbi and Margaux Dillon, AnaEE

Research infrastructures depend on a favorable institutional context, insofar as they strive to develop concepts and tools for the greater societal good, but also because its mission statement depends so greatly on accessing policy-makers and funding. As a result, transnational and transdisciplinary organizations the likes of AnaEE keep tabs on political activity, in an effort to anticipate possible impacts on their operations.

by Jennifer Jacobs and Jo Daniels, University of New Hampshire

The Infrastructure and Climate Network (ICNet) is a network of transportation infrastructure researchers, practitioners, and climate scientists based in the U.S. Northeast. Its mission is to provide actionable climate change data needed to advance infrastructure research and adaptation.

By Geoffrey Saville, Willis Group

Extreme weather events are opportunists. They strike indiscriminately, and selectively expose the parts of society that are underprepared and most vulnerable. We see the lack of resilience to extreme events in the most susceptible regions time and time again in the loss of life and livelihoods and the destruction of properties and businesses.

By Marc Lehmann and Geoffrey Saville, Willis Towers Watson

Hurricane Katrina caused the deaths of an estimated 1833 people, wreaked havoc to an entire region and left a scar on the American psyche. Catastrophes of a similar scale could happen at any time, so what can policy-makers, local communities, private sector organisations and the insurance industry do about it?

By Mari Tye, C3WE ECEP Lead

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana on 29^th August 2005, wreaking damage in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, the parishes of St. Tammany (Slidell), Jefferson (Gretna), Terrebonne (Houma), Plaquemines (Buras), Lafourche (Thibodaux), and St. Bernard (Chalmette), to name but a few. Areas declared as Federal Disaster locations are illustrated in the figure. 1836 people lost their lives, 705 were missing and more than a million people displaced. To date, almost $335M has been spent in recovery and rebuilding efforts.

By Debasish PaiMazumder, C3WE, NCAR

We’re all familiar with flash floods, but ever heard of a flash drought? Flash droughts happen in the absence of any clues from large-scale climate patterns. How can we predict them?