Centering equity in the development of a community resilience planning resource

Abstract

Building community resilience requires centering equity in resilience planning processes. Tools and resources for strengthening community resilience need to address equity in both their content and the process for using them. This is especially so for communities living in proximity to contaminated lands that face compounding hazards (i.e., environmental, disaster, and climate-related); legacies of institutional or structural disenfranchisement; challenges with inclusion of minority populations in planning; and constraints on doing data-intensive planning and management in under-resourced and underserved jurisdictions. A research team from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is developing a new resource, the Equitable Resilience Builder, which will serve communities with intersecting social and environmental vulnerabilities, in pursuit of creating resilience plans and developing the intra-community connections to implement them. This article details how the team used human-centered design to develop the Equitable Resilience Builder. Our objective in doing so is to share the evolution of equity in the project and demonstrate key inflection points in the discovery, synthesis, and ideation phases of human-centered design. The team was able to expand their understanding of what it means to undertake resilience planning in an equitable way during engagements with state, local, tribal agencies, foundations, non-governmental organizations, and academia and through participatory workshops. It developed design principles for how the tool might use storytelling and other techniques to address emotions and trauma, ensure local voices are heard, and encourage relationship building. This article offers lessons learned for others seeking to address resilience and equity in climate risk management, particularly when working with communities in proximity to contaminated lands.