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Resilience Beyond Climate Change Kevin Bush, M.U.P. ’10, is thinking about cyber risk, population growth, affordable housing, and, yes, climate change in the District of Columbia RESILIENCE IS A BUZZWORD for many, from financial planners to athletes to parents with young children. Kevin Bush, M.U.P. ’10, thinks about resilience, too — in the context of cities. Bush recently became chief of resilience and emergency preparedness for the District of Columbia’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. Previously, he spent more than two years as D.C.’s inaugural chief resilience officer. Bush plans for things that no one wants to imagine — the next 9/11, the next super storm, cyberattacks — and most discussions of resilience involve climate change. But Bush also is thinking about chronic stressors like population growth, increased housing costs, aging infrastructure, and inequality. The common thread: preparing residents to thrive in the face of change. “A secret power of the term ‘resilience’ is that its different definitions present an opportunity to bring ordinarily divergent stakeholders together,” Bush says.
In 2016, Washington, D.C., was selected as one of 100 Resilient Cities, a worldwide initiative led by the Rockefeller Foundation to help cities address 21st-century challenges. Stepping into the new chief resilience officer position to spearhead the district’s implementation of the grant was a logical next step for Bush, who had been thinking about resilience for years. He says his foray into the seminal issue of our time “was a classic case of being in the right place at the right time.” Suburban sprawl, not climate change, was on Bush’s mind when he came to Taubman College. He studied climate adaptation when he worked with Professor Larissa Larsen on a project for the U.S. Green Building Council. But it wasn’t until a few years down the road that climate adaptation began to anchor Bush’s career. In 2011, Bush was working for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on President Obama’s Strong Cities, Strong Communities initiative in Rustbelt cities when he was tapped to serve as a Presidential Management Fellow, working with the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality as part of its climate adaptation team. He says his previous work with Larsen put him on the council’s radar. A year into the fellowship, Hurricane Sandy pummeled New York City, and suddenly “our tiny team, which had been working on the federal government’s first climate adaptation plans, was writing memos for the president’s chief of staff and drafting executive orders,” Bush says. “The president identified climate change as one of the top priorities for his second term, and suddenly our work was front and center.” Ultimately, Bush left the White House to join the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force. In the thick of the fray he didn’t have time for career introspection, but he realized later that it was when his career plan gelled. “After a disaster, a lot of money flows into communities, and the old model was to rebuild everything exactly the way it was,” Bush says. “The new model sees disasters as opportunities to rebuild in more resilient ways. Hurricane Sandy showed me that you can work in disaster management and at the same time stand for sustainable development and smarter cities.” Through the task force, Bush co-created Rebuild by Design (RBD), a competition that CNN called a top idea
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SPRING 2020 TAUBMAN COLLEGE
