Resilience science, policy and investment for civil infrastructure

International Journal of Critical Infrastructures, 2010

This article examines disaster recovery and resilience issues following a major hurricane. Two coastal communities were chosen for study following Hurricane Katrina in order to explore the issues in measuring and evaluating recovery and resilience. The communities were Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi. A mix of data sources were employed to determine effects on critical infrastructure at a communitywide scale. The data sources included key informant interviews, GIS data, and secondary data such as newspaper reports, city financial statements, and similar documents. The key findings indicate a methodological problem with the formulation of recovery and resilience curves as discussed in other literature. While information regarding a particular community can be mapped, its characteristics are unique and difficult to generalize to other communities. While this issue is not necessarily new to the area of hazards research, it adds weight to the argument that more should be done to collect post event data that can be analyzed in a cross comparative way with other communities. Recommendations include the establishment of a "data archivist" position that would be colocated in an EOC, and the development of standardized measurement sets that all disaster affected communities would gather post event. Finally, specific recommendations for further research are offered.

Journal of Extreme Events, 2018

The unprecedented number of devastating disasters recently experienced in the United States is a clarion call to revisit how we understand our vulnerability in the face of global change, and what we are prepared to do about it. We focus on the case of Hurricane María’s impact in Puerto Rico to underscore five critical concerns in addressing vulnerability and adaptation planning: (i) vulnerability as a product of flows; (ii) how our beliefs about the capacities of ourselves and others affect local vulnerability; (iii) the role uncertainty, politics, and information access play in amplifying vulnerability and complicating adaptation; (iv) the need for a better distribution of risk and responsibility in adaptation; (v) and the challenge of seizing the opportunity of disasters for transformative change. These five issues of concern were particularly evident in the case of Puerto Rico where Hurricane María’s 155 mph winds exposed existing infrastructural vulnerabilities, institutional in...

PACIFIC EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING RESEARCH CENTER, 2017

In recent years, the concept of resilience has been introduced to the field of engineering as it relates to disaster mitigation and management. However, the built environment is only one element that supports community functionality. Maintaining community functionality during and after a disaster, defined as resilience, is influenced by multiple components. This report summarizes the research activities of the first two years of an ongoing collaboration between the Politecnico di Torino and the University of California, Berkeley, in the field of disaster resilience. Chapter 1 focuses on the economic dimension of disaster resilience with an application to the San Francisco Bay Area; Chapter 2 analyzes the option of using base-isolation systems to improve the resilience of hospitals and school buildings; Chapter 3 investigates the possibility to adopt discrete event simulation models and a meta-model to measure the resilience of the emergency department of a hospital; Chapter 4 applies the meta-model developed in Chapter 3 to the hospital network in the San Francisco Bay Area, showing the potential of the model for design purposes Chapter 5 uses a questionnaire combined with factorial analysis to evaluate the resilience of a hospital; Chapter 6 applies the concept of agent-based models to analyze the performance of socio-technical networks during an emergency. Two applications are shown: a museum and a train station; Chapter 7 defines restoration fragility functions as tools to measure uncertainties in the restoration process; and Chapter 8 focuses on modeling infrastructure interdependencies using temporal networks at different spatial scales.

2017

Resilience is the ability of a community to respond to and recover from disaster. The characteristics of a community that impact resilience include demographic statistics, built infrastructure, the natural environment, economic robustness, and community planning efforts and can number in the hundreds. Critically, these characteristics are not often linked to the hazards to which a community is at risk, limiting the ability of a community to make risk-informed, targeted investment decisions. To help communities prioritize investments in resilience, we describe here a method to define hazard-specific risk based on hazard impacts, correlated with the resilience characteristics aligned with community priorities, and rank these investments based on their relative benefit. Using flood as the proof-ofprinciple hazard, we describe a method and corresponding decision support tool, in development through an effort funded by the US Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directo...

hsaj.org

A common definition of resilience is “the capability of a system to maintain its functions and structure in the face of internal and external change and to degrade gracefully when it must.” 1 This deceptively simple definition, however, belies longstanding difficulties in defining, measuring, and ...

Drawing on our discussions and synthesizing our contributors' hard-earned lessons, we have distilled six key recommendations, explored in depth throughout the report:

International Journal of Strategic Property Management, 2016

2015

As the human and financial costs of natural disasters rise and state finances continue to deplete, increasing attention is being placed on the role of the private sector to support disaster and climate resilience. However, not only is there a recognised lack of private finance to fill this gap, but international institutional and financing bodies tend to prioritise specific reactive response over preparedness and general resilience building. This paper utilises the central tenets of resilience thinking that have emerged from scholarship on social-ecological system resilience as a lens through which to assess investing in disaster risk reduction (DRR) for resilience. It draws on an established framework of resilience principles and examples of resilience investments to explore how resilience principles can actually inform decisions around DRR and resilience investing. It proposes some key lessons for diversifying sources of finance in order to, in turn, enhance "financial resilience". In doing so, it suggests a series of questions to align investments with resilience building, and to better balance the achievement of the resilience principles with financial requirements such as financial diversification and replicability. It argues for a critical look to be taken

Structures Congress 2011, 2011

The concept of Disaster Resilience has received considerable attention in recent years and it is increasingly used as an approach for understanding the dynamics of natural disaster systems. The goal of this paper has two distinct tasks: (i) conduct a literature survey analyzing asset-based approaches for defining and measuring disaster resilience for physical infrastructures that is one of the seven dimensions of the PEOPLES Resilience Framework; (ii) identify the gaps between asset-based approaches and community-scale approaches. It is offered an overview of the models developed in literature to quantify resilience and performances of electric power, water, wastewater and natural gas utilities; communication companies and transportation networks as well as health care facilities. Discussion will be added related to strengths and weakness on how these approaches could facilitate the comparison of alternative resilience options/strategies and measure the speed with which disruptions can be overcome and community functions restored. A new geographic approach will be introduced to measure community resilience, focusing on spatial, temporal scale of resilience.

This paper describes a method for reducing the economic risks associated with predictable natural hazards by enhancing the resilience of national infrastructure systems. The three-step generalised framework is described along with examples. Step one establishes economic baseline growth without the disaster impact. Step two characterises economic growth constrained by a disaster. Step three assesses the economy's resilience to the disaster event when it is buffered by alternative resiliency investments. The successful outcome of step three is a disaster-resistant core of infrastructure systems and social capacity more able to maintain the national economy and development post disaster. In addition, the paper considers ways to achieve this goal in data-limited environments. The method provides a methodology to address this challenge via the integration of physical and social data of different spatial scales into macroeconomic models. This supports the disaster risk reduction objectives of governments, donor agencies, and the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.