Holistic Disaster Recovery: Ideas for Building Local Sustainability After A Natural Disaster

Sustainability in the aftermath of a natural disaster requires the affected communities to take a comprehensive and long-term approach to recovery. Holistic Disaster Recovery: Ideas for Building Local Sustainability After a Natural Disaster was developed as a vital resource for local government staff and officials, state planners, activists, emergency management professionals, disaster recovery experts, mitigation specialists, and others who help communities during disaster recovery.

Originally created in 2001 by the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder with financial backing from PERI, Holistic Disaster Recovery was recently updated and now features a special focus on the Hurricane Katrina recovery. Holistic Disaster Recovery encourages communities to incorporate as many of the principles of sustainability into the recovery process as possible, including environmental quality, economic vitality, quality of life, social equity, citizen participation, and disaster resiliency.

The text of the revised handbook has been streamlined to make it easier and more practical to use for those managing recovery decisions and related activities on the ground. The revised text contains updated sources of information and new examples of recovery success stories.