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18 Hous. J. Health L. & Pol'y 77 (2018)
Microgrids and Resilience to Climate-Driven Impacts on Public Health

handle is hein.journals/hhpol18 and id is 91 raw text is: 





18 Hous. J. Health L. & Pol'y                                  77
Copyright 0 2018 Justin Gundlach
Houston Journal of Health Law & Policy







MICROGRIDS AND RESILIENCE TO CLIMATE-
DRIVEN IMPACTS ON PUBLIC HEALTH

Justin Gundlach'



ABSTRACT

      Resilience has burst into the lexicons of several policy areas in
recent years, owing in no small part to climate change's amplification
of extreme events that severely disrupt the operation of natural, social,
and  engineered  systems. Fostering resilience means  anticipating
severe disruptions as well as planning, investing, and designing so
that such disruptions, which are certain to occur, are made shallower
in depth  and  shorter in  duration. Thus, a  resilient system or
community  can continue functioning despite disruptive events, return
more  swiftly to routine function following disruption, and incorporate
new  information so as to improve operations in extremis and speed
future restorations.
    As different policy communities apply the concept of resilience to
their respective missions, they emphasize different objectives. This
Article examines how the definitions adopted by the public health and
electricity communities could, but will not necessarily, converge in
instances of so electricity outages so severe that they affect the
operation of critical infrastructure, such as wastewater treatment and
drinking water  facilities, hospitals, and cooling centers. Currently,
such outages cause a form of handoff from utilities to their customers:
grid power   fails, and a small constellation of backup generators
maintained  independently  by  individual campuses,  facilities, or


   'Associate Research Scholar at Columbia Law School and Staff Attorney at the Sabin Center
   for Climate Change Law.

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