This is the first book to articulate resilience-based public policy for a constantly changing, complex, and uncertain risk society. Its primary focus is on operationalizing resilience, i.e., on incorporating elements of resilience in public policy in the context of our modern risk society.While there is a wealth of literature on resilience and disaster risk management, there are few publications that focus on the nexus of resilience and public policy, resulting in gaps between various fields and public policy for resilient societies and disaster risk management. In response, this book integrates the latest theoretical insights on public policy and resilience and the latest practical analyses of case studies such as the Tohoku Disaster (Great East Japan Earthquake) in 2011 and Hurricane Sandy on the North American East Coast in 2012 to provide policy tools for future resilient societies and disaster risk management. The recent disaster cases illustrate that our changing, complex and uncertain risk environment requires far more resilience-based public policy through co-production of knowledge than is normally required for conventional disasters. By linking various fields and public policy, the book articulates a resilience-based public policy, i.e., the incorporation of resilience into various entities by designing and implementing “linkages.” These include national-to-local linkages, linkages between different entities such as scientific communities and decision makers, and linkages between financial, human, and information resources. Thus, the nexus of resilience and public policy presented in this book aims at better public policy to face a changing and complex risk society, together with fundamental uncertainties at regional, national, and local levels around the world.

This is the first book to articulate how to address interlinkages among sustainable development goals (SDGs), which are keys to implementing those goals by 2030. At the heart of the book is a resilience approach to the enabling relevant systems, practices, and education and research. While SDGs are well known at different levels from local to global spheres, a major gap can be seen between goals and approaches, as approaches are lacking for addressing interlinkages among SDGs. The United Nations General Assembly in 2015 acknowledged interlinkages as being of crucial importance in ensuring the purpose of the goals. However, few actual approaches have been specified to address the interlinkages or interconnections at both the policy and practical levels. Thus, it is urgent to face the question of how to address the interlinkages by stakeholders—not only policy communities and researchers but also practitioners and students, especially innovators who can go beyond existing boundaries. By highlighting that challenge, this book lays out a path for addressing interlinkages among SDGs by applying a resilience approach to the issues of a sustainable society. The resilience approach has been developed from combinations of different modes of thinking and practices, including the systems approach, systems and design thinking, and resilience thinking and practices. Based on this overarching approach, innovators seek out the relevance of that approach to their SDGs-related practices at the system, local, and educational levels. The book therefore serves as a guide to how the resilience approach can contribute to accelerating implementation of SDGs by 2030.

The world is wrought with risks that may harm people and cost lives. The news is riddled with reports of natural disasters (wildfires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes), industrial disasters (chemical spills, water and air pollution), and health pandemics (e.g., SARS, H1NI, COVID19). Effective risk communication is critical to mitigating harms. The body of research in this handbook reveals the challenges of communicating such messages, affirms the need for dialogue, embraces the role of instruction in proactively communicating risk, acknowledges the function of competing risk messages, investigates the growing influence of new media, and constantly reconsiders the ethical imperative for communicating recommendations for enhanced safety.

Although the expression “responsibility to future generations” is firmly established in public and political vocabulary, its operational meaning and practice are inadequately understood and yet to be systematically evaluated. Moreover, the term has not been successfully translated into viable ethical and theoretical concepts that can guide public policies and actions. How can the modes of governance and established policy priorities become compatible with the well-being of future generations? The primary objective of this book is to identify the conditions of and obstacles to governance for a sustainable future, or future-regarding governance. Governance concerns steering a society over extended periods of time, not responding to particular policy issues. The ideas and strategies proposed by contributors in this book to establish future-regarding governance are based on the theoretical and empirical analyses of the major long-term problems facing advanced democracies in general, and Japan in particular. Japan is an interesting case indeed. Relatively poor climate policy, rapidly decreasing birth rate, aging population, extensive public debt, prolonged economic recession, healthcare and pension systems that urgently require redesigning, hollowing-out of industries and subsequent loss of jobs, deteriorating infrastructures, increasing nuclear waste, and intensifying social polarization have caused a decline in people’s trust in the government and democratic processes. Currently, Japanese citizens are widely circulating their doubts about the social system’s sustainability. This book comprises two parts. In Part I, authors from various disciplinary backgrounds examine the idea of governance for a sustainable future from theoretical perspectives. This part discusses issues associated with future-regarding governance that are wicked in nature, such as the philosophical/ethical foundation on which to base the idea of governance for a sustainable future, major impediments to the development of future-regarding governance, and the modes of thinking and action required by leaders and citizens to realize such governance. Chapters in Part II largely focus on the state of long-term governance in Japan. This part uses empirical and in-depth analyses with cross-sectoral and cross-national policy perspectives to identify the state of future-regarding governance in various policy fields and major sectors or organizations mainly in Japan, while also examining strategies and measures to improve their performance. From this perspective, Western democracies and weak democratic regimes elsewhere will be provided with valuable lessons to avoid fatal policy mistakes, thereby improving future-oriented governance worldwide. By combining theoretical discussions on far-reaching issues and empirical analyses of Japanese cases, the book will shed a new light on governance for a sustainable future.

Over the past decade, resilience has gained significant traction across the nation and innovative programs are showing exciting progress in building resilient communities. For communities to be prepared for future extreme weather and climate events, as well as the chronic daily stressors, the momentum of implementing and taking action to build community resilience should continue to be fostered and expanded. Building on its many efforts dedicated to increasing and enhancing resilience, the Resilient America Roundtable hosted the State of Resilience Leadership Forum and Community Workshop on June 28 and 29, 2016. This activity brought together diverse decision makers, experts, practitioners, and community stakeholders, including representatives from academia, government, the private sector, foundations, and nonprofit organizations, to consider the results of years of investment, experimentation, and research in building resilience, take stock of these many initiatives and efforts, and share their experiences in building more resilient communities. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each. One way to reduce the impacts of disasters on the nation and its communities is to invest in enhancing resilience-the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative addresses the broad issue of increasing the nation's resilience to disasters. This book defines "national resilience", describes the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters, and frames the main issues related to increasing resilience in the United States. It also provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience and outlines additional information, data, gaps, and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation's resilience to disasters. Additionally, the book's authoring committee makes recommendations about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States. Enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward. Disaster Resilience confronts the topic of how to increase the nation's resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. Increasing disaster resilience is an imperative that requires the collective will of the nation and its communities. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.