Towards a resilience management guideline — Cities as a starting point for societal resilience

Unexpected crises and risks affect the urban population. Critical infrastructure dependency, climate change and social dynamics have captured the attention of city decision makers across different disciplines, sectors, and scales. Addressing these challenges mandates an increase in resilience. This article presents the development of the novel European Resilience Management Guideline (ERMG) developed by the European H2020 Smart Mature Resilience (SMR) project. It encompasses five supporting tools for city resilience. The purpose of this article is threefold. First, it describes the extensive co-creation methods used to establish, validate and test the five ERMG tools as collaborations among…

An Overview of Public Concerns During the Recovery Period after a Major Earthquake: Nepal Twitter Analysis

In responding to disasters, Twitter is extensively used, both for information exchange and mapping the crisis, among citizens, and in relation to national and international humanitarian responders. This paper reports Twitter analysis aimed at identifying the most pressing issues that arose in the short term recovery phase starting about a week after the Nepal earthquake, including the heretofore neglected topic of mismatch between international relief and local cultures. Based on Twitter data collected between April 30th and May 6th 2015. 1,074,864 raw messages apparently related to the Nepal earthquake were retrieved, filtered and analyzed. This exploratory adapts established frameworks fo…

City Resilience Dynamics tool

Group model building: a collaborative modelling methodology applied to critical infrastructure protection

Large crises management, affecting CIs needs multidisciplinary knowledge including technical, economical, social, political, legal and managerial knowledge. Being these crises international a huge variety of agents is involved in their response. This situation concludes in a set of stakeholders who only have fragmented knowledge. In the presence of dispersed and incomplete knowledge, and of fragmented and disrupted crisis management, the collaborative approach group model building (GMB), where modelling experts unify fragmented, tacit knowledge from domain experts, is a valuable option. However, GMB has been little used in CIP. We have done so in the context a European project on crisis man…

Insights from a Computer Simulation Model of a Landslide Disaster

Disasters do not follow scripts and the management of disasters requires that responders act as "emergent organizations". We argue that a computer simulation model of the management of a major landslide suggests a disequilibrium-experimenting-emergence process in terms of feedback loops (Performance adjustment, Cognitive load causes errors, Communication mismatch causes errors, and Learning). Arguably, improvement of the drivers of such feedback could help improve the management of disasters.

Improving the Crisis to Crisis Learning Process

While crises may appear to be event-driven, post-mortem accounts often identify factors that accumulate over time and increase the likelihood of failure. These factors are particularly difficult to anticipate when multiple organizations are involved in crisis preparation and event detection. Through the development of a systems-based model of crisis management, it was learned that knowledge sharing can be accelerated or inhibited by the development of trust among organizations through the management of events. Is it possible to operationalize this finding? This hypothesis is one of the findings of the SEMPOC project, which examined crisis preparation and mitigation in the hypothetical conte…

Are Cities Aware Enough? A Framework for Developing City Awareness to Climate Change

Cities are growing and becoming more complex, and as they continue to do so, their capacity to deal with foreseen and unforeseen challenges derived from climate change has to adapt accordingly. In the last decade, an effort has been made to build city resilience and improve cities' capacity to respond to, recover from and adapt to climate change. However, certain city stakeholders' lack of proactive behavior has resulted in less effective city resilience-building strategies. In this sense, the importance of developing stakeholders&rsquo

Shifting to climate change aware cities to facilitate the city resilience implementation

Abstract Climate change (CC) is one of the most urgent threats to modern societies, having direct and indirect consequences on the rapid growth of urban areas. Cities are attempting to both reduce their impact on the environment and build resilience to be able to face the irreversible effects of CC through plans and strategies. However, barriers, such as the fact that cities are complex systems and the uncertainty posed by CC have led to less engaged and committed city stakeholders, which have hampered the operationalisation of city resilience. In this context, developing city stakeholders awareness has been demonstrated to be an effective way to put an end to passive behaviour and help tra…

Insights from a Simulation Model of Disaster Response: Generalization and Action Points

In a prior paper we presented a system dynamics model that simulates responder behavior in a Norwegian landslide. The model shows how a set of vicious feedback loops caused by following standard organizational procedures that do not fit the disaster situation initially increases errors in response. Eventually learning and sensemaking in an improvisation/experimentation process leads to new emergent dynamics whereby the loops act virtuously. In this paper we aim to generalize this initial study by explaining in more detail how the model can describe large scale disaster responses of different types and how it relates to the wider disaster response literature. We discuss what types of levers,…

Implementation Methodology of the Resilience Framework

Failure of Critical Infrastructures (CIs) can have severe consequences for our societies. Therefore, CI resilience has attracted increasing attention in industries and policy-making. However, empirical studies on CI resilience are rare. In particular, research on the implementation of policies aiming at an improvement of CI resilience is lacking. Using Group Model Building combined with the Delphi method, and surveys we have developed a framework to improve CI resilience. This research identifies policies to enhance CI resilience against major industrial accidents across four dimensions (technical, organizational, economic and social) and proposes a temporal order to ensure that the benefit…