Resilient Disaster Recovery: The Role of Health Impact Assessment

Abstract

Health Impact Assessments (HIAs) offer an important way of improving infrastructure decision-making during the post-disaster recovery period. Although increasingly used in support of non-emergency planning decisions HIAs have not yet been widely adapted for disaster recovery contexts. The growing acceptance of broader definitions of health and the setting of future health goals, informed by lay preferences and perspectives as well as expert ones, are assisting the transition to new more holistic policies. Experience in New Jersey, following Hurricane Sandy, provides illustrations of infrastructure impacts and the challenges they pose to local communities. Traditional definitions of physical infrastructure are expanding to include categories like “green infrastructure” and “economic infrastructure”; experts and laypersons are also making different assessments of both the character and the salience of infrastructure needs. Multiple competing priorities for attention by survivors further constraint the degree to which infrastructure issues can be addressed by individual survivors and their families. Opportunities and barriers for the use of HIAs in disaster recovery are identified and explored. The coproduction of policies that capture varieties of knowledge and preferences about infrastructure among experts and laypeople is encouraged.

Governmental organizations … continue to spend heavily on hardening levees, raising existing homes, and repairing damaged facilities despite evidence that social, not physical, infrastructure drives resilience (Aldrich and Meyer 2015).

…although there is growing emphasis on incorporating resilience-building efforts into the recovery process, such efforts tend to focus on hardening critical infrastructure and not on strengthening the health and resiliency of individuals and communities (Institute of Medicine 2015).