Resilience-based Approaches Research Articles

Examining the Role of Self-Harm in the Relationship between Emergency Department Service Utilization and Trauma-Induced Homelessness among Homeless Individuals in Texas.

Homelessness is a complex public health problem in the United States. Current or ongoing history of trauma among individuals adds to the complexity and challenges of homelessness. Our study assessed the moderating role of self-harm in the association between emergency department (ED) service utilization and trauma-induced homelessness (TIH) among adults in Texas. Homeless adults (N = 282) who completed their baseline Vulnerability Index Service Prioritization Decision Assistance Prescreen Tool survey between February 2021 and February 2022 at a Local Mental Health Authority in Texas were selected. The outcome variable, TIH, was assessed by current period of homelessness due to experiencing trauma or abuse. The main independent variable was ED utilization, while self-harm in the past year was assessed as the moderating variable. A multivariate logistic regression with a moderation analysis was conducted while adjusting for the covariates. Individuals who utilized ED services and engaged in self-harm and risky behaviors had greater odds of experiencing current period of TIH. Male respondents were less likely to experience TIH. Finally, engaging in self-harm significantly moderated the association between ED service use and TIH. This study may help inform efforts to develop tailored interventions and promote resilience-based approaches to improve health outcomes among individuals experiencing homelessness due to TIH.

Assessing spatiotemporal change in coral reef social-ecological systems.

Coral reef resilience is eroding at multiple spatial scales globally, with broad implications for coastal communities, and is thus a critical challenge for managing marine social-ecological systems (SESs). Many researchers believe that external stressors will cause key coral reefs to die by the end of the 21st century, virtually eliminating essential ecological and societal benefits. Here, we propose the use of resilience-based approaches to understand the dynamics of coral reef SESs and subsequent drivers of coral reef decline. Previous research has demonstrated the effectiveness of these methods, not only for tracking environmental change, but also for providing warning in advance of transitions, possibly allowing time for management interventions. The flexibility and utility of these methods make them ideal for assessing complex systems; however, they have not been used to study aquatic ecosystem dynamics at the global scale. Here, we evaluate these methods for examining spatiotemporal change in coral reef SESs across the global seascape and assess the subsequent impacts on coral reef resilience. We found that while univariate indicators failed to provide clear signals, multivariate resilience-based approaches effectively captured coral reef SES dynamics, unveiling distinctive patterns of variation throughout the global coral reef seascape. Additionally, our findings highlight global spatiotemporal variation, indicating patterns of degraded resilience. This degradation was reflected regionally, particularly in the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean SESs. These results underscore the utility of resilience-based approaches in assessing environmental change in SESs, detecting spatiotemporal variation at the global and regional scales, and facilitating more effective monitoring and management of coral reef SESs.

Evidence for managing herbivores for reef resilience.

Herbivore management is an important tool for resilience-based approaches to coral reef conservation, and evidence-based science is needed to enact successful management. We synthesized data from multiple monitoring programs in Hawai'i to measure herbivore biomass and benthic condition over a 10-year period preceding any major coral bleaching. We analysed data from 20 242 transects alongside data on 27 biophysical and human drivers and found herbivore biomass was highly variable throughout Hawai'i, with high values in remote locations and the lowest values near population centres. Both human and biophysical drivers explained variation in herbivore biomass, and among the human drivers both fishing and land-based pollution had negative effects on biomass. We also found evidence that herbivore functional group biomass is strongly linked to benthic condition, and that benthic condition is sensitive to changes in herbivore biomass associated with fishing. We show that when herbivore biomass is below 80% of potential biomass, benthic condition is predicted to decline. We also show that a range of management actions, including area-specific fisheries regulations and gear restrictions, can increase parrotfish biomass. Together, these results provide lines of evidence to support managing herbivores as an effective strategy for maintaining or bolstering reef resilience in a changing climate.

Quantification of coastal transportation network resilience to compounding threats from flooding and anthropogenic disturbances: A New York City case study

Technological advancements and management adaptations have improved the function of engineered systems in response to threats from coastal flooding. Other natural and anthropogenic disturbances such as pandemics, utility hijacking, infrastructure destruction, and biochemical releases can stress a system beyond acceptable limits or in ways not previously conceived. Such threats can be direct or indirect and often result in large-scale disruption to the critical functions of the system. Traditional risk management approaches, while effective for known and predictable threats, are not adequate preparation for compound disturbances that are often unpredictable and not well defined. Rather, a resilience-based approach is required. Resilience-based approaches acknowledge that multiple disruptions to the system will occur, such as the interaction of impending hurricanes and evacuation complications due to a pandemic, while focusing on the recovery and maintenance of critical functions. The system can be stressed with multiple disturbances to determine its capacity to resist and recover. Analysis of these capacities or subsequent failures can then be used to determine the resilience of the system and provide insight into remedial actions or improvements. A framework combining hydrologic modeling and network science can be used to determine critical weaknesses in transportation infrastructure due to compounding threats. This determination could be used to address pre-disaster staging by identifying areas that are likely to be isolated and to identify the characteristics of a resilient network to incorporate into future designs. To analyze resilience under compounded disturbances, coastal flood modeling is combined with hypothetical vehicle bridge failure in New York City, USA, and connectivity is analyzed through the use of ego networks. Our results show network analysis can be effectively used to identify areas of need to improve whole network resilience and is a valuable tool to quantify the compounding effects of multiple threats.

"Strike at the Root": Co-designing Real-Time Social Media Interventions for Adolescent Online Risk Prevention

Adolescent online safety researchers have emphasized the importance of moving beyond restrictive and privacy invasive approaches to online safety, towards resilience-based approaches for empowering teens to deal with online risks independently. Unfortunately, many of the existing online safety interventions are focused on parental mediation and not contextualized to teens' personal experiences online; thus, they do not effectively cater to the unique needs of teens. To better understand how we might design online safety interventions that help teens deal with online risks, as well as when and how to intervene, we must include teens as partners in the design process and equip them with the skills needed to contribute equally to the design process. As such, we conducted User Experience (UX) bootcamps with 21 teens (ages 13-17) to first teach them important UX design skills using industry standard tools, so they could create storyboards for unsafe online interactions commonly experienced by teens and high-fidelity, interactive prototypes for dealing with these situations. Based on their storyboards, teens often encountered information breaches and sexual risks with strangers, as well as cyberbullying from acquaintances or friends. While teens often blocked or reported strangers, they struggled with responding to risks from friends or acquaintances, seeking advice from others on the best action to take. Importantly, teens did not find any of the existing ways for responding to these risks to be effective in keeping them safe. When asked to create their own design-based interventions, teens frequently envisioned "nudges" that occurred in real-time. Interestingly, teens more often designed for risk prevention (rather than risk coping) by focusing on nudging the risk perpetrator (rather than the victim) to rethink their actions, block harmful actions from occurring, or penalizing perpetrators for inappropriate behavior to prevent it from happening again in the future. Teens also designed personalized sensitivity filters to provide teens the ability to manage content they wanted to see online. Some teens also designed personalized nudges, so that teens could receive intelligent, guided advice from the platform that would help them know how to handle online risks themselves without intervention from their parents. Our findings highlight how teens want to address online risks "at the root" by putting the onus of risk prevention on those who perpetrate them - rather than on the victim. Our work is the first to leverage co-design with teens to develop novel online safety interventions that advocate for a paradigm shift from youth risk protection to promoting good digital citizenship.

Toward Attack Modeling Technique Addressing Resilience in Self-Driving Car

Self-driving cars are going to be the main future mode of transportation. However, such systems like, any other cyber-physical system, are vulnerable to attack vectors and uncertainties. As a response, resilience-based approaches are being developed. However, the approaches lack a sound attack model that recognizes the attack vectors and vulnerabilities such a system would have and that does a proper severity analysis of such attacks. Moreover, the existing attack models are too generic. Currently, the domain lacks such specific work pertaining to self-driving cars. Given the technology and architecture of self-driving cars, the field requires a domain-specific attack model. This paper gives a review of the attack models and proposes a domain-specific attack model for self-driving cars. The proposed attack model, severity-based analytical attack model for resilience (SAAMR), provides attack analysis based on existing models. Also, a domain-based severity score for attacks is calculated. Further, the attacks are classified using the decision-tree method and predictions of the type of attacks are given using long short-term memory network.

Understanding the #plandemic: Core framings on Twitter and what this tells us about countering online far right COVID-19 conspiracies

This paper examines the need and possibility for developing online resilience-based approaches in response to COVID-19 vaccine conspiracies, often linked to the far right. Examining three datasets collected between December 2020 and April 2021, this paper details conspiracy narratives that have developed around COVID-19 vaccines, with specific focus on understanding the deployment of the idea of a planned pandemic or so-called ‘#plandemic’. This is then used to consider where existing resilience-based approaches to countering off-line polarisation and extremism might posit an appropriate online response. The article identifies four key #plandemic framings of COVID-19 vaccines — as control, as reset, as unnecessary and as unsafe — and analyses how these themes are constructed, to find that they are often created through hostile and confrontational interaction with other users. Based on these findings, the conclusion suggests companies shift their focus away from ‘negative’ approaches to content moderation (e.g., content removal) and towards resilience-building responses that cultivate flexible individual identities, build community support networks, and/or engage users with national and supranational democratic structures, as a more effective response to the sharing of online conspiracies.

Spatiotemporal variability in Swedish lake ecosystems.

Studying ecosystem dynamics is critical to monitoring and managing linked systems of humans and nature. Due to the growth of tools and techniques for collecting data, information on the condition of these systems is more widely available. While there are a variety of approaches for mining and assessing data, there is a need for methods to detect latent characteristics in ecosystems linked to temporal and spatial patterns of change. Resilience-based approaches have been effective at not only identifying environmental change but also providing warning in advance of critical transitions in social-ecological systems (SES). In this study, we examine the usefulness of one such method, Fisher Information (FI) for spatiotemporal analysis. FI is used to assess patterns in data and has been established as an effective tool for capturing complex system dynamics to include regimes and regime shifts. We employed FI to assess the biophysical condition of eighty-five Swedish lakes from 1996–2018. Results showed that FI captured spatiotemporal changes in the Swedish lakes and identified distinct spatial patterns above and below the Limes Norrlandicus, a hard ecotone boundary which separates northern and southern ecoregions in Sweden. Further, it revealed that spatial variance changed approaching this boundary. Our results demonstrate the utility of this resilience-based approach for spatiotemporal and spatial regimes analyses linked to monitoring and managing critical watersheds and waterbodies impacted by accelerating environmental change.

COVID-19, Livestock Systems and Food Security in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review of an Emerging Literature.

In this paper, we carried out a systematic literature review to document the emerging scientific knowledge about COVID-19 impact on livestock systems and food security in developing countries to identify gaps and possible avenues for future research undertakings. Specifically, we systematically reviewed 68 peer-reviewed articles extracted based on rigorous selection criteria from Scopus, PubMed and ISI Web of Science databases and published between December 2019 and February 2021. Our results reveal that livestock supply chains presented an important ‘intermediary’ pathway through which the pandemic affected various dimensions of food security in developing countries. Although the research response has been rapid in terms of both quantity and temporal succession, we find a highly suggestive disjunction in studies analyzing the interconnections between COVID-19 pandemic, livestock systems and food security in developing countries. With respect to the livestock supply chain, the bulk of the reviewed evidence focuses on production and consumption, whereas considerably less focus is given to the pandemic’s impact on intermediaries within livestock chains, including traders, intermediaries and processors. The analysis of livestock supply chain resilience revolves predominantly around the ‘absorbance’ and ‘recovery’ phases of resilience, whereas only a small subset of the literature investigates actions taken by supply chain actors to ‘plan’ or to ‘adapt’ livestock systems in order to reduce their vulnerability and enhance their overall resilience. Furthermore, food security has often been narrowly defined, with the majority of articles focusing on ‘availability’ and ‘accessibility’ to food due to the pandemic, and other dimensions of food security, including utilization, stability and sustainability, have been widely neglected. Based on our findings, we recommend future research to examine the dynamics of propagation of COVID-19 impact through livestock supply chains in order to develop more targeted interventions that enhance the capacity of developing countries to cope with this and future disruptions and mitigate their food insecurity outcomes. To this end, more holistic, integrated and resilience-based approaches are much recommended to recognize the complex nature of livestock systems in developing countries and to address the multifaceted and widespread effects of COVID-19 on food security channeled through livestock chains.

Development of a civil infrastructure resilience assessment framework and its application to a nuclear power plant

Recent disruptive events, such as earthquakes or floods, have caused severe damage to civil infrastructure systems. Thus, there is a need to extend the focus of traditional design practices to include resilience-based design approaches which can help in defining preventive actions and measures to mitigate the consequences caused by such disruptive events. This paper presents a Civil Infrastructure Resilience Assessment Framework (CIRAF) to assess the seismic fragility and resilience of a single or multiple interconnected civil infrastructure systems following a disruptive event. Once the information regarding the infrastructure system, hazards, fragility functions, component's damage state correlation, recovery models, and upgrade models are identified, then the framework can be used to quantify the loss of functionality, recovery time, repair cost, and overall resilience using a Bayesian Network approach. A state-of-the-art engineering tool is also developed using the framework that would enable the stakeholders to compare different upgrade strategies through an easy to use web interface and thus easing the decision-making process. A case study of a hypothetical nuclear power generation system is used to assess the seismic fragility and resilience using the proposed framework.

Coping and wellbeing in bereavement: two core outcomes for evaluating bereavement support in palliative care

BackgroundBereavement support is a core part of palliative care. However, the evidence base is limited by a lack of consistency in the outcomes used to evaluate services and models of support, which makes it difficult to compare approaches. Core Outcome Sets (COS) represent the minimum that should be measured in research into specific conditions or services. The aim of this study was to use a stakeholders’ perspective to develop a COS for evaluating bereavement support for adults in adult palliative care settings.MethodsA list of outcomes relevant to bereavement support was created following a systematic review of the quantitative and qualitative literature. At an expert workshop 21 stakeholders discussed their views on the most important outcomes and compared these to and critiqued the lists constructed from the review. These lists and discussions informed a two round international DELPHI survey (n = 240) designed to reach consensus on which outcomes/outcome dimensions should be included in the COS. To prioritise and validate the items emerging from the survey, participants at a subsequent consensus day ranked the relative importance of these items (n = 23). A final feedback exercise with these consensus day participants was conducted to confirm the selection of outcomes and dimensions.Results‘Ability to cope with grief’ and ‘Quality of life and mental wellbeing’ were selected as two core outcomes. Twenty-one different dimensions to explore when assessing these outcomes were also identified. The coping related dimensions have been categorised as: Negative and overwhelming grief; Communication and connectedness; Understanding, accepting and finding meaning in grief; Finding balance between grief and life going forwards; Accessing appropriate support. Those relating to quality of life and wellbeing have been categorised as; Participation in work and/or regular activities; Relationships and social functioning; Positive mental wellbeing and Negative mental and emotional state.ConclusionThis COS outlines a more consistent way forward for bereavement researchers and practitioners, whilst also orientating towards public health and resilience-based approaches to bereavement care. Further work is planned to identify and develop measures which are specific to this core outcome set, and which will facilitate the future comparability of bereavement services and interventions.

(Re)constructing Conceptualizations of Health and Resilience among Native Hawaiians

Biomedical definitions of health have conventionally taken problem-based approaches to health, which may disregard indigenous perspectives of health that take a holistic approach and emphasize the importance of maintaining balance between physical, mental, and spiritual health and relationships maintained with others, the land, and the spiritual realm. Resilience-based approaches to health have been shown to foster strengths in indigenous communities, including the Native Hawaiian community, which leads to more positive health outcomes. The research questions of this paper asked, “how do Native Hawaiians conceptualize health and the concept of resilience specific to health?”. Qualitative methods were employed to explore the concept of resilience from the perspective of 12 Native Hawaiian adults. Community leaders and key stakeholders aided in the purposive recruitment process. The themes of this study include: (1) health maintained through balance, (2) being unhealthy vs. being ill, (3) the concept of colonialism and resulting adversities, and (4) protective and resilience factors that foster health. Cultural values and cultural practices may address concerns related to health disparities that stem from cultural and historical trauma, determinants of health, and environmental changes. Health interventions that are culturally-, family-, spiritually-, and land-based may particularly aid in responsiveness to health programs.

Contemporary issues: Resilience training alone is an incomplete intervention

Resilience training focuses on the individual to improve self-care, self-efficacy, and work/life balance with an aim to reduce burnout. However, the concept of resilience is complex and contextual, affected by the interplay between an individual and their environment. As such, any intervention to promote resilience in healthcare workers must recognize and address structural and organizational factors, as well as individual influences. Resilience-based approaches are often grounded in a strength-based model, emphasizing factors that promote success, while often overlooking factors that contribute to failure (Cross, 2015). Without examining and addressing factors in the work environment contributing to burnout, resilience training alone is an incomplete intervention.

When places collide: power, conflict and meaning at Malheur

Place meanings—notions of what a given location is, and what it ought to be—are critical to the social negotiations that produce regulatory and management regimes. These, in turn, contribute to the material social–ecological outcomes that determine both the sustainability of system processes and the ways in which costs and benefits are distributed across society. Ascribed meanings are foundational to the social determination of what constitutes a ‘desirable’ system state, a core concern of resilience-based approaches to managing sustainability transformations. However, place meanings are never simple or unitary—they are diverse, overlapping, and often contested. While such contestations over place meanings may remain latent, at times they erupt into overt social conflict wherein competing narratives of place find visceral, and even violent, expression. Taking a particular case—the armed standoff between ranchers and federal agents at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in the United States in early 2016—we examine the ways in which place meanings and associated place claims first informed and then gave rise to violent conflict, and explore the relevance of these for understanding social–ecological processes in contested places and implications for transformation toward sustainability. Tracing the origins of the conflict at Malheur through the contested histories of place-making in the American West, we argue: (1) place meanings are produced and compete across a highly uneven landscape of power wherein some place claims are privileged while others struggle to gain traction; (2) contested place meanings come to particular dominance when they achieve the status of ‘normal’—when they inform the taken-for-granted lenses through which society views a place. However, dominant claims are never hegemonic, always facing the threat of subaltern claims, and so the process of place-making is never finished; (3) place meanings and conflict over these are often brought to our attention in contemporary time involving local places, but they are typically the product of very pre-contemporary and non-local influences and trajectories, pointing to important cross-scalar relationships; and (4) conflict over place meanings and claims, while problematic and sometimes destructive, may also be generative. Conflict provides moments of opportunity wherein latent contestations are surfaced and made explicit, prompting new social negotiations that may lead to new and surprising outcomes. We also explore the implications of contestation over place meanings with regard to the production of social capital and possible roles that place attachment may play in fostering resilience within contested areas and informing efforts to navigate change toward more sustainable futures.

An indicator set to track resilience to climate change in agriculture: A policy-maker’s perspective

Resilience-based approaches to climate change have yet to be widely applied in agriculture. In this sector, indicators have been centered on the impacts of climate on production systems, crops, yields, infrastructure, financial performance, farmers’ livelihoods and food security. This paper focuses on designing an indicator set to capture the resilience of agriculture to inform decision-making frameworks and policies. The indicators’ selection and definition were driven by their relevance for decision-making through the combined knowledge of policy and information priorities on climate change impacts and vulnerabilities as well as pragmatic issues relating to data availability. In total, 36 indicators were selected covering the following areas: regional drivers of the change to the agricultural sector (demographics, agricultural markets, climate); farmland production activities (food and feed); non-farm economy; and primary outcomes (off-farm net income, numerous environmental services). By coordinating this process among policy-makers with different roles in regional planning, we were able to identify shared information needs among the various sectoral representatives. The indicator selection process also captured policy gaps potential responses that could increase resilience and feed directly into policy reviews, thereby strengthening integration of actions across sectors. This indicator set emphasizes that the relationships between government agencies and both industry and academia may be improved by addressing gaps in data availability, accessibility, and privacy constraints.

Biological invasions, ecological resilience and adaptive governance

In a world of increasing interconnections in global trade as well as rapid change in climate and land cover, the accelerating introduction and spread of invasive species is a critical concern due to associated negative social and ecological impacts, both real and perceived. Much of the societal response to invasive species to date has been associated with negative economic consequences of invasions. This response has shaped a war-like approach to addressing invasions, one with an agenda of eradications and intense ecological restoration efforts towards prior or more desirable ecological regimes. This trajectory often ignores the concept of ecological resilience and associated approaches of resilience-based governance. We argue that the relationship between ecological resilience and invasive species has been understudied to the detriment of attempts to govern invasions, and that most management actions fail, primarily because they do not incorporate adaptive, learning-based approaches. Invasive species can decrease resilience by reducing the biodiversity that underpins ecological functions and processes, making ecosystems more prone to regime shifts. However, invasions do not always result in a shift to an alternative regime; invasions can also increase resilience by introducing novelty, replacing lost ecological functions or adding redundancy that strengthens already existing structures and processes in an ecosystem. This paper examines the potential impacts of species invasions on the resilience of ecosystems and suggests that resilience-based approaches can inform policy by linking the governance of biological invasions to the negotiation of tradeoffs between ecosystem services.

Ecosystem Perceptions in Flood Prone Areas: A Typology and Its Relationship to Preferences for Governance

A shift appears to be occurring in thinking about flooding, from a resistance-based approach to one of resilience. Accordingly, how stakeholders in flood-prone regions perceive the system and its governance are salient questions. This study queried stakeholders’ internal representations of ecosystems (resistance- or resilience-based), preferences for governance actors and mechanisms for flooding, and the relationship between them in five different regions of the world. The influence of personal experience on these variables was also assessed. Most respondents aligned themselves with a resilience-based approach in relation to system connectedness and response to disturbance; however, respondents were almost evenly split between resistance- and resilience-based approaches when considering system management. Responses generally were considered to hold for other disturbances as well. There was no clear relationship between internal representations and preferences for governance actors or mechanisms. Respondents generally favoured actor combinations that included governments and mechanism combinations that included regulations and policies. Those who had personal experience with flooding tended to align themselves with a resilience-based internal representation of system management, but personal experience showed no clear relationship with governance preferences. The findings support an evolutionary perspective of flood management where emerging paradigms enhance preceding ones, and prompt a critical discussion about the universality of resilience as a framing construct.

Introduction to Special Issue: Resilience-Based Approaches to Trauma Intervention for Children and Adolescents

Introduction to Special Issue: Resilience-Based Approaches to Trauma Intervention for Children and Adolescents

Building Resilience in Children and their Communities Following Disaster in a Developing Country: Responding to the 2010 Earthquake in Haiti

This paper provides an example of a resilience-based intervention approach to acute trauma that addresses individual-level resilience in children and in those that care for them, and the community as a whole. Resilience-based approaches to trauma intervention focus on activating the protective processes in each individual child to lead to better psychosocial outcomes. However, rebuilding or strengthening community capacity is essential to supporting resilience at the community-level. This paper illustrates how one foreign NGO provided resources, training, and guidance to community members who were seeking help in implementing trauma intervention. Through equal partnership with local leaders, the intervention was translated to meet the specific cultural and contextual needs of children and childcare workers in the tent cities and schools of Port au Prince following the earthquake. Marrying financial and technical support with local expertise resulted in a sustainable, trauma-informed, culturally-oriented solution to providing intervention post-earthquake.

The association of resilience, perceived stress and predictors of depressive symptoms in sexual and gender minority youths and adults

Research in the sexual and gender minority population (SGM) tends to focus on describing risk factors for negative health outcomes and identification of stressors, which tend to be higher in this population compared to the non-SGM (i.e., mainstream heterosexual) population. This study examines the intersection between perceived stress and resilience associated with self-reported depressive symptoms using standardised instruments, such as the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-2), among SGM adults (n = 3017) and youths (n = 232). A higher proportion of SGM individuals are stressed and report depressive symptoms compared to non-SGM individuals, whereas the mean resilience scores were similar to the general population. For SGM adults, but not youths, we found an association between lower resilience scores and higher perceived stress scores. SGM adults who had a ‘higher’ depressive symptom score (PHQ-2 ≥ 3) were more likely to have a lower resilience score, a higher stress score, be unemployed or disabled, and less likely to have attended some college or graduated from college. For SGM youth, higher stress and lower resilience scores were associated with ‘higher’ depressive symptom score (PHQ-2 ≥ 3). Our findings suggest that resilience-based prevention and treatment approaches to depression may serve to mitigate the effect of stress in SGM individuals.