Where resilience has scaled
Abby Ross, CEO, The Resiliency Company
In my fifth edition of this newsletter, I made the case for incremental change where the small moves individual stakeholders make add up to big change. Some readers will look at that premise and conclude that the proposed solutions are too small, too slow, not enough and I get it. We urgently need to build for tomorrow’s reality, and sometimes small changes like tweaking an RFP process feel like a drop in the bucket.
In the world of ideas and possibilities, it’s easy to call for a new paradigm of resilient investing across every category of infrastructure in all fifty states. But one of the best places to start is by tracing the actual path where things have successfully moved from idea to pilot to policy to prescient. The early proof points are what eventually unlock wider adoption and scale, and they almost never look like proof when they begin. This week, The Epicenter, our affiliated publication, published three of my go-to examples of how resilience solutions that started small got to a meaningful scale.
Firewise: From Neighborhood Meetings to Insurance Market Relevance
Firewise started as a handful of neighbors clearing brush, sharing information, and taking responsibility for the risks around them. Today, nearly 3,000 communities participate in the Firewise program, and states like California are beginning to incorporate such mitigation efforts into underwriting decisions.
FORTIFIED: Turning Better Construction Into Better Economics
After experiencing mounting losses from hurricanes and increasing insurance costs, Alabama launched Strengthen Alabama Homes anchored on the Insurance Institute For Business & Home Safety (IBHS) FORTIFIED standard, a building method devised to better withstand severe weather. By combining homeowner grants, contractor training programs, and insurance incentives, the state now has a functioning ecosystem and market that has had a measurable impact on increased home values for homeowners and reduced losses for insurers.
Soft-Story Retrofits: Local Ordinances That Reshaped Seismic Safety
California's older housing stock is filled with soft-story buildings where the upper floors can collapse downward during an earthquake. Engineering studies, local assessments, and voluntary programs created a groundswell for cities like San Francisco, LA, Berkeley, Oakland, Burbank, San Jose, Pasadena, Santa Monica, and West Hollywood to implement ordinances for better bracing, the process of reinforcing floors with steel structures.
The full article in The Epicenter goes deep into the programs and their impact. The reason I like these examples is because we can trace the progression of pilot to scale, of small to large, of voluntary to policy. But looking forward, it’s hard to spot that one small step can lead to so much more. That is what The Resiliency Company is set up to achieve - help ideas go from pilot to program to scale.
