New Holistic Disaster Recovery Handbook
Provides Ideas for Building Local Sustainability

[Excerpted from Handbook Preface]
The Natural Hazards Center, University of Colorado at Boulder, has produced a new handbook on how to build sustainability into a community during the recovery period after a disaster. It has background information, practical descriptions, and ideas about what sustainability is, why it is a good for a community, and how it can be applied during disaster recovery to help create a better community.

The book is intended to be used by local officials, staff, activists, and the disaster recovery experts who help the community during disaster recovery -- including state planners, emergency management professionals, mitigation specialists, and others. Whether a community is just getting over the emergency period after being stricken by a hurricane, earthquake, flood, or other disaster, or whether it is looking ahead and wants to know how to get ready to handle the aftermath of such an event, this handbook will provide ideas, guidance, examples, and places to look for more information.

This guide was produced under a 20-month project funded by the Public Entity Risk Institute entitled "A Project to Develop Guidance and Expertise on Sustainable Recovery from Disaster for Communities." The project developed out of a recognition that small- and medium-sized towns, can have difficulty figuring what to do, or how to do it, when they are confronted with the need to recover from a disaster. The intent of this work was to try to consolidate what is known about sustainable recovery at the local level and to fill in the gaps by suggesting ways to do things in innovative ways. This handbook is one of the results of that work.

The complete handbook is available for download from the Natural Hazards Center Website. The January 2002 issue of the Natural Hazards Informer, also available for download, provides a summary of the information contained in the handbook. (See also the November 1999 RRBDIN online workshop with Natural Hazards Center researchers.)

Handbook Index Page
January 2002 Informer (476k PDF file)
Natural Hazards Center Home Page
November 1999 Online Workshop

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