Risk and resilience lessons from Venice

In the history of disasters in Venice, there are implications for modern times in terms of complex systems management and emerging threats, in particular from examples of risk management and resilience achieved by the Venetian state during outbreaks of the plague. In fourteenth century Venice, risk assessment the way we practice it today would fail to provide meaningful recommendations to reduce the casualty rate of the plague epidemic because the cause and transmission of the disease was not understood. Instead, a set of systemic actions across the social, economic, and transportation networks of the city taken by officials and doctors eventually slowed and arguably stopped the spread of the disease. These latter actions are an early example of what is now considered resilience management. Resilience management improves a complex system’s ability to prepare, absorb, recover, and adapt to unexpected threats and does so by address the capabilities at a system, rather than component, level. Resilience management can be a guide to addressing current issues of population growth and rising sea level in modern day Venice and across the globe. This paper calls for integration of resilience assessment in comprehensive risk and resilience management framework.     

A value-based approach to infrastructure resilience

This paper includes the findings of MMI Thornton Tomasetti’s investigation into the measurement of resilience within infrastructure using systems thinking and focussed on value delivery. This paper provides a review of current practise across critical infrastructure sectors, based on a series of interviews undertaken with stakeholders from various UK infrastructure organisations. Gaps and opportunities were identified and an outline for a value-based approach to diagnosing, measuring and building resilience suggested. The performance of critical infrastructure sectors was also comparatively assessed using the suggested approach value metrics.     

A measurement of community disaster resilience in Korea

Building a community that is resilient to disasters has become one of the main goals of disaster management. Communities that are more disaster resilient often experience less impact from the disaster and reduced recovery periods afterwards. This study develops a methodology for constructing a set of indicators measuring Community Disaster Resilience Index (CDRI) in terms of human, social, economic, environmental, and institutional factors. In this study, the degree of community resilience to natural disasters was measured for 229 local municipalities in Korea, followed by an examination of the relationship between the aggregated CDRI and disaster losses, using an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression method and a geographically weighted regression (GWR) method. Identifying the extent of community resilience to natural disasters would provide emergency managers and decision-makers with strategic directions for improving local communities' resilience to natural disasters while reducing the negative impacts of disasters.     

Contributions of green infrastructure to enhancing urban resilience

After briefly reviewing key resilience engineering perspectives and summarising some green infrastructure (GI) tools, we present the contributions that GI can make to enhancing urban resilience and maintaining critical system functionality across complex integrated social–ecological and technical systems. We then examine five key challenges for the effective implementation of GI that include (1) standards; (2) regulation; (3) socio-economic factors; (4) financeability; and (5) innovation. We highlight ways in which these challenges are being dealt with around the world, particularly through the use of approaches that are both context appropriate and socially inclusive. Although progress surmounting these challenges has been made, more needs to be done to ensure that GI approaches are inclusive and appropriate and feature equally alongside more traditional ‘grey’ infrastructure in the future of urban resilience planning. This research was undertaken for the Resilience Shift initiative to shift the approach to resilience in practice for critical infrastructure sectors. The programme aims to help practitioners involved in critical infrastructure to make decisions differently, contributing to a safer and better world.     

Design for resilience in infrastructure distribution networks

The recognition that resilience is a critical aspect of infrastructure security has caused the national and homeland security communities to ask “How does one ensure infrastructure resilience?” Previous network resilience analysis methods have generally focused on either pre-disruption prevention investments or post-disruption recovery strategies. This paper expands on those methods by introducing a stochastic optimization model for designing network infrastructure resilience that simultaneously considers pre- and post-disruption activities. The model seeks investment–recovery combinations that minimize the overall cost to a distribution network across a set of disruption scenarios. A set of numerical experiments illustrates how changes to disruption scenarios probabilities affect the optimal resilient design investments.     

Determinants of state mining enterprise resilience in Latin America

The performance of many state-owned mining firms in Latin America has been disappointing. There is at least one interesting exception: Chile's Codelco has been more resilient than, say, its counterparts in Bolivia and Peru. The state mining firms of Bolivia and Peru were decapitalized by low autonomy, flawed tax policies and weak macroeconomic policies - even as the importance of such firms in the economy increased. In contrast, Codelco benefited from an orthodox macroeconomic policy which sensibly, if belatedly, adopted a mineral stabilization fund. It also enjoyed a more profit related tax regime and somewhat higher commercial autonomy. Nevertheless, the Chilean experience requires some important qualifications before it can be used as a model for other developing countries.     

Improving communication resilience for effective disaster relief operations

The objective of this paper is to identify strategies to improve the resilience of interagency communication between relief organizations and the community when dealing with an emergency. This research draws from frameworks including information theory, organization design, and how the private sector has learned and evolved from the challenges of information flow to provide guidance to disaster relief agencies. During times of emergency, private organizations as well as public authorities must coordinate in real time to create an effective response. When coordination is absent, failure results, as was seen after Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti Earthquake. Using data that the authors collected immediately after these disasters, two case studies of systemic failure are presented to extract lessons that might be used to improve communication resilience through coordination between parties in humanitarian relief operations. Recent emergency response trends are identified, and the paper argues that the persistence of response failures is not surprising, in part because response organizations normally operate independently, and their operations evolve at different rates. As a result, the organizational interfaces that enable rapid integration during a disaster naturally degrade and may be weak or absent. Integrating the literature on information processing theory and organization design with the data from the two case studies, the paper proposes that increasing the resilience of disaster response systems can be achieved by (1) improving the interoperability and information flow across organizational boundaries; (2) increasing the synergies between organizations on adapting new technology such as social media for the coordination of structured and unstructured data for use in decision-making, and (3) increasing the flexibility of relief organizations to use external resources from areas not affected by disasters on an opportunistic basis. The paper concludes by discussing resilience enhancing solutions including boundary spanning investments and argues that effective emergency response does not result from sporadic or intermittent efforts but rather requires sustained investment, continuous monitoring, and data collection.     

An experimental investigation of resilience decision making in repeated disasters

Environment Systems and Decisions - Given the growing prevalence of catastrophic events and health epidemics, policymakers are increasingly searching for effective strategies to encourage firms to...     

Defining and analyzing health system resilience in rural jurisdictions

Environment Systems and Decisions - Rural areas face well known and distinctive health care challenges that can limit their resilience in the face of health emergencies such as the COVID-19...     

On some aspects of ecological resilience and the conservation of species

The importance of the notion of resilience in determining the static and the intertemporal behaviour of jointly determined ecological-economic systems has long been recognized by ecologists. This notwithstanding, there are very few formal studies of such systems which explicitly analyse the ecological and the economic aspects of the problem. Consequently, this paper has two objectives. First, a new stationary probability-based method is proposed to characterize the notion of ecological resilience. Next, this characterization is used to study the problem of optimal species conservation.     

Developing an integrative urban resilience capacity index for plan making

Urban resilience assessment can help planners understand the status of resilience in an urban system and identify needs for improving resilience capacities. The issues related to urban resilience are complex because of multiple urban system components, threats from different sources, and uncertainty of the future. Urban resilience theories have progressed to consider an urban system as an integrated complex system; however, urban resilience assessments are inconsistent and underdeveloped in assessing an integrated urban system for different threats at various uncertainties. In an effort to address this deficiency, we propose to develop an Integrative Urban Resilience Capacity Index (IURCI) for assessing urban resilience capacity for all threats. To improve the quality of urban resilience assessment, the IURCI considers urban physical form, spatial structure, preparation for future, and performance after plan implementation to measure resilience capacities of absorption, mitigation, and adaptation. It is built in a Scenario-Based Planning Support System (SB-PSS). The SB-PSS is a framework and an open system that integrates IURCI with scenario generation, modeling, and assessment to inform the public, planners, and other stakeholders about the consequences of different planning policies and to assist them make decisions for implementing a preferred scenario.     

Panarchy use in environmental science for risk and resilience planning

Environmental sciences have an important role in informing sustainable management of built environments by providing insights about the drivers and potentially negative impacts of global environmental change. Here, we discuss panarchy theory, a multi-scale hierarchical concept that accounts for the dynamism of complex socio-ecological systems, especially for those systems with strong cross-scale feedbacks. The idea of panarchy underlies much of system resilience, focusing on how systems respond to known and unknown threats. Panarchy theory can provide a framework for qualitative and quantitative research and application in the environmental sciences, which can in turn inform the ongoing efforts in socio-technical resilience thinking and adaptive and transformative approaches to management.     

Engineering meets institutions: an interdisciplinary approach to the management of resilience

Resilience management stretches across the decoupled domains of community, corporate, and public governance. As a result, fostering resilience needs a governance structure that supports collective actions and integrates fragmented fields with different institutional frameworks. In this study, we carry out a review of three different perspectives on resilience -engineering, social, and organizational- in order to explore resilience management in the context of governance of infrastructure systems. We discuss the common practices to address resilience of engineering systems, the need and current trend for integration of institutions into these practices through formal (e.g., policies and regulations) as well as informal mechanisms (e.g., trust, norms, and shared cognitive structures). To illustrate our theorizing, we provide three illustrative case studies. The cases highlight the barriers and enablers across the three perspectives and highlight the inter-organizational context of management of resilience. We uncovered organizational dynamics such as the necessity of establishing critical functionality through organizational capacity for stakeholder engagement, the need for diverse organizations to address institutional complexity in management of resilience, and the importance of decoupling in aligning the outcomes of resilience management practices with policies. We suggest an agenda for future research on managing practices associated with management of resilience.     

Flood resilience: consolidating knowledge between and within critical infrastructure sectors

Flood resilience has been rising up the political, economic and social agendas. Taking an integrated systems approach, using the right design guidance and tools and ensuring that education is in place for all stakeholders are three themes which are intrinsically linked to delivering flood resilience. This paper reviews these themes across the academic research, policy landscape and practitioner approaches, drawing conclusions on the way forward to increase our societies resilience to floods. The term ‘flood resilience’ is being increasingly used, however, it remains to be clearly defined and implemented. The UK, USA and Australia are leading the way in considering what flood resilience really means, but our review has found few examples of action underpinned by an understanding of systems and complexity. This review investigates how performance objectives & indicators are currently interpreted in guidance documents. It provides an in-depth exploration of the methods, that although developed through European and US expertise, can be used for worldwide application. Our analysis highlights that resilience is often embedded in engineering education and frequently linked to risk. This may however, mask the importance of resilience and where it differs from risk. With £2.6 billion to be spent in the UK over the next 6 years on strengthening the country’s flood and coastal defences, this is the opportunity to rethink resilience from a systems approach, and embed that learning into education and professional development of engineers. Our conclusions indicate how consolidating flood resilience knowledge between and within critical infrastructure sectors is the way forward to deliver flood resilience engineering.