024 Brock Long and Ashley Ward on Response and Resilience

On this episode of Find Your Sustain Ability, host Laura England sits down with Dr. Ashley Ward, director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University and Brock Long, former FEMA administrator and executive chairman of Hagerty Consulting, for a deep dive into the meaning and practice of community resilience. Drawing from their extensive experience in climate policy, emergency management and public health, the conversation explores how communities can prepare for and adapt to increasingly frequent and complex climate-related challenges—from extreme heat to infrastructure vulnerabilities. The discussion emphasizes the importance of trust, collaboration and policy reform while also highlighting practical strategies that empower individuals, institutions and governments to build stronger, more resilient communities. Set against the backdrop of Appalachian State University’s Climate Resilience Forum and recent local disasters, the episode brings a grounded, urgent and hopeful lens to the future of sustainable development.

 

 

Transcript

Laura:

Welcome everyone to the Find Your Sustain Ability podcast. I'm your host, Laura England from the Department of Sustainable Development, and I'm currently working full-time on App State's five-year climate literacy initiative called Pathways to Resilience. Today's episode focuses on climate resilience. I'll introduce our expert guests with an abbreviated version of their bios and then we'll get to know them more, get to know about their work as we go.

Dr. Ashley Ward, welcome to the studio. Dr. Ward is the director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment and Sustainability. And her work focuses on the health impacts of climate extremes as well as community resilience. She works with communities, public agencies, scientists, and decision makers to create effective policy solutions to climate challenges. Ashley's expertise and skill set are in high demand these days. She participated in the White House Extreme Heat Summit last fall, and through Duke's Heat Policy Innovation Hub, she's worked with United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the World Meteorological Organization and the World Health Organization.

Also with us is Brock Long, executive chairman of Hagerty Consulting and former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. While serving as FEMA administrator, Brock coordinated the federal government's response to over 144 presidentially declared disasters and 112 wildfires, including three of the nation's most devastating hurricanes and five of the worst wildfires ever experienced.

While at FEMA, Brock also led major initiatives like Community Lifelines, which will have long-lasting impacts on the emergency management community. This leader in the field of emergency management is also a two-time App State alum. He completed a bachelor's degree here in '97 and a Master's of Public Administration in '99. Brock and Ashley, thank you so much for joining me in the studio today. I'm excited to learn more about your work.

Ashley:

Thanks for having me.

Brock:

Yeah, great to be here.

Laura:

And also want to note and acknowledge for our listeners that Ashley and Brock just spoke to a room full of students, faculty, staff, and community members at our Climate Resilience Forum. And it was just fascinating to learn about your expertise, your area of work, and the work that we all have to do as a town here in Boone, as a broader community, a state nation world. We have a lot of work to do to achieve climate resilience, don't we?

Brock:

Yeah, absolutely. I think it was great to see almost 300 people show up today.

Ashley:

It was packed.

Brock:

It was a packed house. So I think that the Pathways to Resilience program at App got some real influence to make some changes in maybe the way that we go forward in the future to talk about resilience.

Laura:

Thanks. It's great to hear that. And the student participation has been so wonderful so far, and they're learning so much, especially when we bring in experts like the two of you. We have an audience with wide-ranging backgrounds. So I thought we'd start with a foundational question about resilience, climate resilience, community resilience. Can you share a little bit of your thoughts? I know people define it differently, but share a little bit of your thoughts on what do we mean by community resilience and climate resilience?

Ashley:

I think officially the common definition is the ability to bounce back after something happens. That's what resilience is. I think it would be nice if people thought really holistically about the ecosystem in which they live when they think about resilience. So what I've heard Brock talk about a lot is do you know your neighbors? Your neighbors