New Research Note: Building Back Better in small and remote Nordic-Arctic communities
A new Research Note by Matthias Kokorsch, Freja Kidal and Jóhanna Gísladóttir presents a practitioner-oriented Build Back Better assessment checklist tailored specifically to small and remote Nordic-Arctic communities.
Build Back Better (BBB) is a central principle of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030, which sees recovery, rehabilitation and reconstruction as opportunities to reduce future disaster risk rather than simply restore pre-disaster conditions.
Many useful BBB policies, guidelines and recovery-readiness tools already exist. Rather than developing another general framework, the authors brought key elements from these approaches together in a compact, settlement-scale assessment toolbox. It pays particular attention to conditions that matter in remote Nordic and Arctic communities, including dependence on national support, vulnerable infrastructure connections, volunteer capacity, place-dependent livelihoods, community cohesion, relocation, demographic viability, and financing and insurance arrangements.
The Research Note was developed within ARCHAIC – Sustainable and Resilient Communities in Remote Settlements in the Arctic in the Age of Climate Change, funded by NordForsk. ARCHAIC examines climate adaptation and natural-hazard risk in remote Arctic settlements, including early warning, emergency preparedness and crisis management, relocation from high-risk areas, and how Arctic adaptation experience can inform practice elsewhere. The assessment checklist grew particularly from ARCHAIC's work on relocation and the question of how Build Back Better can contribute to sustainable community development.
We are also very happy that our CRD student Freja Kidal has joined our project. With her professional background in emergency preparedness and risk management, Freja contributed to the further development of the framework and helped test it from a practitioner perspective.
The checklist is intended as a discussion, evidence and monitoring tool, not as a certification system or a final answer to whether a community should rebuild or relocate. It remains a work in progress, and further application in different settlements will be important for testing and developing it.
We hope it can be useful for municipalities, civil-protection professionals, planners, researchers and others working with recovery and resilience in Nordic, Arctic and remote regions. Feedback, practical experiences and suggestions for developing the framework further are very welcome.
The Research Note is a part of UW's publication series.