High-Performance and Energy Resilient Communities: Disaster prevention through community engagement

As a part of an integrated approach to formulating a plan and comprehensive program for facing natural disasters, human settlements need to first understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) within their own localized communities with respect to such disasters. A starting point is to engage local communities in order to assess their baseline understanding of community capacity and capabilities, and to identify and synergize already established disaster prevention and response programs, systems and initiatives. Maui Island, located in the State of Hawaii within the United States of America, was used as a case study to highlight specific opportunities and constraints that selected communities located on Maui Island face in their decision making for energy resilience. Relevant stakeholder groups and their respective roles in disaster mitigation and response are described. Methods for how best to engage local communities around such topics are described, including community surveys, stakeholder workshops, community working groups, and community forums. Methods for how to assess community capacity and capabilities around disaster resilience are also described, including identifying key stakeholders representing a cross section of the local community and studying community response to past disaster events in order to identify successes, best practices, failures and lessons learned. More specifically, this paper provides a deeper understanding of the opportunities and constraints associated with energy infrastructure on Maui Island when seeking to optimize for energy resilience in the face of natural disasters such as hurricanes, tsunamis, flooding and earthquakes. This baseline inventory of energy resilience for selected Maui communities is assessed at the community level. Further research will then apply an adapted methodology to an analysis at the building cluster or district level. This framework can serve to inform similar communities seeking to enhance their energy resilience through bottom-up community engagement.