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Abstract
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In the United States, Critical Infrastructure is defined and regulated by the federal government [1, 2]. Yet in an emergency (such as storm-related flooding or other climate-induced emergencies) federal, state, and municipal management or aid is often not available to the individual household for hours to days [3-5] even when major Critical Infrastructure has been affected. From a climate emergency survival perspective, Critical Infrastructure needs to be redefined from a community-based point of view so that individual households can identify home-level Critical Infrastructure vulnerabilities and plan adaptations for increased climate emergency resilience at the household level.
Current efforts to enhance societal and community resilience are generally top-down, usually organized or funded by the federal or state governments and focused on enlisting municipalities to impose resilience solutions from the (local) top down [6]. However, when major storms or other acute extreme weather-related events occur, individuals and families (i.e. community members) are typically left on their own to cope with the short term, acute damage-causing agents, like flooding or severe wind [7-10]. To facilitate more effective and efficient community level adaptation to the changing climate, resilience-focused adaptations need to be (re-)framed for the community member. From a community climate resilience perspective, for both the emergency survival and response perspectives, communities consider what is available to them during the emergency, not how the different industrial sectors are managed. What is considered "Critical Infrastructure" from a personal, household, or neighborhood perspective is function-based: what are the fundamental infrastructures needed to support daily life. This will be different for different families or households. Children, the elderly, and community members with disabilities require additional considerations that must be taken into account in definitions of Critical Infrastructure.
The sixteen 2022 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Critical Infrastructure sectors include: Chemical; Commercial Facilities; Communications; Critical Manufacturing; Dams; Defense Industrial Base; Emergency Services; Energy; Financial; Food and Agriculture; Government Facilities; Healthcare and Public Health; Information Technology; Nuclear; Transportation; and Water and Wastewater [11]. Two main factors make these federal Critical Infrastructure groupings inappropriate for community-based considerations and for use in community-based planning of adaptations for enhancing household and neighborhood level resilience...
Language: en |