Disaster resilience is everyone’s business and is a shared responsibility among citizens, the private sector, and the government. Increasing resilience to disasters requires bold decisions and actions that may pit short-term interests against longer-term goals. As a nation, we have two choices. We can maintain the status quo and move along as we have for decades—addressing important, immediate issues such as the solvency of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), the most effective ways to discourage development in high-risk areas, and how to improve the speed and effectiveness disaster response. Or, we can embark on a new path—one that also recognizes and rewards the values of resilience to the individual, household, community, and the nation. Such a path requires a commitment to a new vision that includes shared responsibility for resilience and one that puts resilience in the forefront of many of our public policies that have both direct and indirect effects on enhancing resilience.

The nation needs to build the capacity to become resilient, and we need to do this now. Such capacity building starts with individuals taking responsibility for their actions and moves to entire communities working in conjunction with local, state, and federal officials, all of whom need to assume specific responsibilities for building the national quilt of resilience. In the context of this report, the committee has used the term “community” in a very broad sense, encompassing the full range of potential communities – including local neighborhoods, family units, cities, counties, regions, or other entities. Defining a “community” as part of the nation’s sense of collective resilience is a very site-specific endeavor and the committee wanted to address this report toward the many kinds of communities that exist across the country.