Recovery, Renewal, Resilience: Informing, supporting and developing guidance for local Resilience
Our project takes a systems approach to Recovery and Renewal from COVID-19 to build Resilience.
Description
Our project takes a systems approach to Recovery and Renewal from COVID-19 to build Resilience. We are developing a new framework which supports Resilience partners as they design Recovery Strategies that will reinstate local preparedness for future emergencies. The framework also supports those who design Renewal Initiatives that strive to deliver major transformations of local Resilience. The framework is being developed through extensive partnership working with local governments, and has led to an international standard (ISO 22393) on Recovery and Renewal for Resilience. Our framework, partnership working, and ISO 22393 aim to make a difference in the aftermath of COVID-19.
Our project team produces ‘The Manchester Briefing on COVID-19’, a fortnightly document that brings together international lessons which may prompt thinking on Recovery and Renewal from COVID-19. The Manchester Briefing is distributed to over 50,000 through a network of partners and is core to our engagement with the Resilient Cities Network which disseminates it to its 4,000 cities.
This research is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), as part of UK Research and Innovation’s rapid response to Covid-19 (Project number: ES/V015346/1), by The University of Manchester, and partners.
Did the Sendai Framework change or contribute to changes in your activities/organization? If so, how?
The Sendai Framework provides specific encouragement to academic, scientific, and research entities in regards to their contribution to disaster risk reduction. For example, we found motivation in the call to “promote common efforts in partnership with the scientific and technological community, academia and the private sector to establish, disseminate and share good practices internationally.” Furthermore, there is a renewed call so that these partnerships can support local communities and authorities, closing the gap between policy and science for decision-making.
What led you to make this commitment/initiative?
What was your position before making this Voluntary Commitment / prior to the Sendai Framework?
Recovery is "the process of rebuilding, restoring and rehabilitating the community following an emergency" (HMG Emergency Response and Recovery, 2013). For COVID-19, Recovery will involve all-of society (because everyone in the country has been affected to some extent) and whole-system (because every organisation, service and function has been affected). Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic we have deployed our research expertise in emergency Response and Recovery to support government. This has involved providing ongoing information about Recovery, producing rapid Response guides on aspects of Response and Recovery, and identifying opportunities for research to support the Recovery effort. This project builds on this initial work to understand how government develop plans for short-term, transactional 'Recovery' and how they think strategically about longer-term, ambitious, transformational change which we call 'Renewal'.
