Community of Practice for Modeling Disaster Recovery

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to facilitate a community of practice for disaster recovery modeling. This community should include hazard and disaster researchers without modeling experience and modelers with no experience in hazard and disaster research, not just the growing number of researchers that have experience with both. Disaster recovery modelers should develop mutual resources such as data sets, programming libraries, documentation, and terminology. For a community of practice to function, it needs to generate and appropriate a shared repertoire of ideas, approaches, and institutional memory. A potential shared repertoire of eight complimentary recovery modeling approaches to adopt, research, and advance is laid out. The largest need for lifeline recovery modeling—the most commonly researched recovery topic—is to research how to simulate lifeline infrastructure as sociotechnical systems in comprehensive, meaningful ways. For housing recovery modeling, a major gap is the inability to simulate rental dynamics, as well as the role of race and ethnicity. Lastly, a concerted and coordinated research effort is needed to create comprehensive platforms for simulating community recovery.