Resilience Goals Research Articles

Hindcasting Loss and Evaluating Implications of Track Location for the 2011 Joplin, Missouri Tornado

Abstract The direct physical loss from a tornado is one possible factor in considering resilience goals for a community. Estimating such loss has historically been achieved either through analysis of empirical data from historical events meant to then match future hypothetical events or through a cost analysis based on a building's damage state. These approaches provide a solid baseline for estimating loss from wind events; however, gathering data from historical events may assume all locations are the same, while analyses based solely on the building damage state may not include a building's contents. This study builds on work previously established in determining loss from building damage state fragilities, by including a loss to the building's interior (including contents) based on Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA's) HAZUS equations. The approach laid out in this paper is then validated, showing what is deemed an acceptable level of accuracy, using the May 22, 2011 Joplin tornado that devastated the local community. Once validated, the same tornado path is relocated in different directions, ultimately crossing most of city of Joplin in four additional hypothetical scenarios. The results of both hindcasting the 2011 Joplin tornado and its hypothetical track variations show commercial (nonresidential) type buildings as key in contributing to the direct physical loss of a wind event. Ultimately, this provides decision makers with a point of consideration when evaluating their community's resilience goals.

Governing urban resilience: Organisational structures and coordination strategies in 20 North American city governments

This paper describes how urban resilience governance is structured and coordinated in 20 North American cities (19 US and one Canadian) based on interviews with city officials. This co-produced research evolved out of conversations with city officials in Portland, Oregon, who were interested to learn how other cities were organising resilience work. Interviews focused on emerging definitions, organisational structures, internal and external coordination efforts, and practitioners’ insights. The paper includes a descriptive summary of how cities are structuring and coordinating resilience efforts. Additionally, we discuss how current trends in resilience coordination can inform future directions for urban resilience scholarship. We compare what practitioners view as key success factors against six commonly theorised characteristics for effective resilience governance. Overall, we find considerable overlap in lessons from theory and practice, including the benefits of a systems approach, the need for a clear definition of resilience, strong leadership, and stakeholder engagement. Practitioners use resilience to diagnose the overall health of their cities. Additionally, practice tends to emphasise limitations such as political turnover, trade-offs between centralised and dispersed organisation, and the need to carefully diagnose and scope resilience work, whereas the academic literature calls for multi-level and cross-scale governance and feedbacks and more transformative action. Given these insights, we highlight opportunities for new resilience scholarship, including analysing the benefits of the diagnostic phase of resilience planning, evaluating resilience goals to determine the best departmental fit, and understanding local barriers and trade-offs to adopting a broad systems approach.

Comparative Assessment of Water Governance in Protected Areas

This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the governance systems of nature areas in relation to resilience measures in the field of water and nature management. The main question is to identify the key characteristics of governance that influence the resilience of the selected areas. The purpose of this comparative study is to understand and explain how aspects within the governance context influence the success of policy initiatives or measures towards resilience goals. For comparison, the hierarchic method is used. The results of the five case studies are compared: four cases from the Netherlands and one from UK. For the assessment of the governance of selected areas the governance assessment tool is used to systematically assess the relevant elements and qualities of the governance contexts and to understand the circumstances for the implementation of adaptive measures. The results of the comparison reveal different combinations of the governance qualities creating, to some extent, the setting for the resilience of the areas in which external factors and continuous interaction between layers of the governance system influence the adaptive capacity of the governance to manage resilience.

Stochastic optimal sizing of distributed energy resources for a cost-effective and resilient Microgrid

Recent developments and advances in distributed energy resources (DERs) make them more affordable, accessible, and prevalent in microgrids. Research on designing and operating a microgrid with various DERs has received increasing attention during the past few years. This paper proposes a two-stage stochastic mixed-integer programming method for jointly determining optimal sizes of various DERs, considering both economic benefits and resilience performance. The proposed method explicitly models the interaction between DER sizing at the planning stage and hourly or sub-hourly microgrid dispatch at the operating stage in both grid-connected and island modes, considering stochastic grid disturbances, load, and renewable generation. A formulation method is then proposed to convert the stochastic sizing problem to an equivalent mix-integer linear programming problem, which can be efficiently solved even with a large number of system operating conditions. Using the proposed stochastic sizing method, a resource planning analysis for a military base in the U.S. is presented. It is found that the proposed method can effectively determine the optimal DER sizes to meet a required resilience goal at the maximum net-benefit. Impacts of several key factors including tariff rates, discount rate, and survivability level on optimal DER sizes are analyzed through case studies.

Modelling the effect of accelerated forest management on long-term wildfire activity

We integrated a widely used forest growth and management model, the Forest Vegetation Simulator, with the FSim large wildfire simulator to study how management policies affected future wildfire over 50 years on a 1.3 million ha study area comprised of a US national forest and adjacent lands. The model leverages decades of research and development on the respective forest growth and wildfire simulation models, and their integration creates a strategic forest landscape model that has a high degree of transparency in the existing user communities. The study area has been targeted for forest restoration investments in response to wildland fires that are increasingly impacting ecological conditions, conservation areas, amenity values, and surrounding communities. We simulated three alternative spatial investment priorities and three levels of management intensity (area treated) over a 50-year timespan and measured the response in terms of area burned, fire severity, wildland-urban interface exposure and timber production. We found that the backlog of areas in need of restoration on the national forest could be eliminated in 20 years when the treatment rate was elevated to a maximum of 3× the current level. However, higher rates of treatments early in the simulation created a future need to address the rapid buildup of fuels associated with understory shrub and tree regeneration. Restoration treatments over time had a large effect on fire severity, on average reducing potential flame length by up to 26% for the study area within the first 20 years, whereas reductions in area burned were relatively small. Although wildfire contributed to reducing flame length over time, area burned was only 16% of the total disturbed area (managed and burned with prescribed fire) under the 3× management intensity. Interactions among spatial treatment scenarios and treatment intensities were minimal, although inter-annual variability was extreme, with the coefficient of variation in burned area exceeding 200%. We also observed simulated fires that exceeded four times the historically recorded fire size. Fire regime variability has manifold significance since very large fires can homogenize fuels and eliminate clumpy stand structure that historically reduced fire size and maintained landscape resiliency. We discuss specific research needs to better understand future wildfire activity and the relative influence of climate, fuels, fire feedbacks, and management to achieve fire resiliency goals on western US fire frequent forests.

Life-cycle analysis (LCA) to restore community building portfolios by building back better II: Decision formulation

The catastrophic social, economic, and political impact from extreme natural hazards in recent years, e.g. Hurricane Katrina (2005), the Christchurch Earthquake (2011), and the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami (2011), have engendered questions from public officials, engineers and planners as to how a community’s damaged building portfolio might be best reconstructed to enhance its performance in future hazards. The concept of building back better reflects a reconstruction approach aimed at enabling the community to achieve better performance in future hazard events. Building portfolio life-cycle analysis, developed in a concurrent study, can quantify the impact of specific reconstruction policies and decisions on the building portfolio within a community. This approach, coupled with community-dependent resilience goals aimed at limiting functionality loss and ensuring quick recovery, is utilized in this study to suggest optimal policies for post-disaster reconstruction and to guide cost-effective public decisions aimed at ensuring community resilience. The feasibility of this concept is explored using reconstruction of a mid-size community following a severe earthquake as an example in which key features that may affect optimal reconstruction decisions by community planners are identified.

Life-cycle analysis (LCA) to restore community building portfolios by building back better I: Building portfolio LCA

In recent years, the United States and other countries have experienced catastrophic consequences of severe natural hazards, e.g. the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, the 2011 Christchurch Earthquake, and the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. These consequences motivate the question: How should a community’s damaged building portfolio be reconstructed efficiently to enhance its performance under future hazard events and meet the resilience goals of the community? The relatively recent notion of Building Back Better requires a quantitative methodology that can address each phase of building portfolio recovery following a severe hazard event and provide decision support to best enhance the performance of the portfolio under future hazards. This study extends notions of life-cycle analysis from individual buildings to building portfolios to support post-hazard reconstruction decisions at the community level. The building portfolio expected life-cycle cost and cumulative prospect value are adopted as decision metrics which reflect varying degrees of risk aversion on the part of community decision-makers. The applicability of these building portfolio life-cycle analyses and some key aspects in their implementation are explored using a moderate-sized community that is susceptible to extreme earthquake hazards.

A resilience-based method for prioritizing post-event building inspections

Despite the wide range of possible scenarios in the aftermath of a disruptive event, each community can make choices to improve its resilience, or its ability to bounce back. A resilient community is one that has prepared for, and can thus absorb, recover from, and adapt to the disruptive event. One important aspect of the recovery phase is assessing the extent of the damage in the built environment through post-event building inspections. In this paper, we develop and demonstrate a resilience-based methodology intended to support rapid post-event decision making about inspection priorities with limited information. The method uses the basic characteristics of the building stock in a community (floor area, number of stories, type of construction, and configuration) to assign structure-specific fragility functions to each building. For an event with a given seismic intensity, the probability of each building reaching a particular damage state is determined, and is used to predict the actual building states and priorities for inspection. Losses are computed based on building usage category, estimated inspection costs, the consequences of erroneous decisions, and the potential for unnecessary restrictions in access. The aim is to provide a means for a community to make rapid cost-based decisions related to inspection of their building inventory. We pose the decision problem as an integer optimization problem that attempts to minimize the expected loss to the community. The advantages of this approach are that it: (1) is simple, (2) requires minimal inventory data, (3) is easily scalable, and (4) does not require significant computing power. Use of this approach before the hazard event can facilitate planning and resources allocation in advance of an event to achieve the desirable resiliency goals of a community.

A.M.B.R.O.S.I.A

When writing today's distributed programs, which frequently span both devices and cloud services, programmers are faced with complex decisions and coding tasks around coping with failure, especially when these distributed components are stateful. If their application can be cast as pure data processing, they benefit from the past 40--50 years of work from the database community, which has shown how declarative database systems can completely isolate the developer from the possibility of failure in a performant manner. Unfortunately, while there have been some attempts at bringing similar functionality into the more general distributed programming space, a compelling general-purpose system must handle non-determinism, be performant, support a variety of machine types with varying resiliency goals, and be language agnostic, allowing distributed components written in different languages to communicate. This paper introduces Ambrosia, the first system to satisfy all these requirements. We coin the term "virtual resiliency", analogous to virtual memory, for the platform feature which allows failure oblivious code to run in a failure resilient manner. We also introduce novel programming language constructs for resiliently handling non-determinism. Of further interest is the effective reapplication of much database performance optimization technology to make Ambrosia more performant than many of today's non-resilient cloud solutions.

Effect of catastrophe insurance on disaster-impacted community: Quantitative framework and case studies

Catastrophe insurance is an important pre-disaster risk management tool that reduces excessive financial burdens of homeowners following a hazard event and expedites the recovery processes of disaster-impacted buildings and the community that they comprise. This paper proposes a quantitative framework for assessing the effect of catastrophe insurance on community recovery by modeling the insurance purchase decisions of individual homeowners. The framework consists of two sequentially linked phases (i.e., pre-disaster individual homeowner's decision model and post-disaster community-level recovery model) to (a) explicitly link the pre-disaster insured states of homeowners to their post-disaster financial availability and potential delay due to financing and (b) eventually assess the aggregated impact of delayed building recoveries on community recovery process. The proposed framework is applied to two residential districts to validate the pre-disaster homeowner's decision model, assess the effect of catastrophe insurance on community recovery process, and investigate the combined effect of insurance and other post-disaster redevelopment activities on community resilience. The results indicate that catastrophe insurance speeds up the recovery process of a community by reducing the financing delay time of insured houses while reducing the number of insolvency claims following a hazard event. The quantitative impact of insurance on community resilience provides guidance on how catastrophe insurance can be used in a broad resilience planning to achieve both short- and long-term community resilience goals. Moreover, the proposed framework enables the quantitative comparison of many competing pre- and post-disaster risk management strategies, which might be useful in allocating limited disaster funds across them.

Security through societal resilience: Contemporary challenges in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACTThe concept of societal resilience has rapidly spread throughout the policy world, driven by the desire to use systems theories and process understandings to develop new security approaches for coping, bouncing-back, and adaptive improvement in the face of shocks and disturbances. However, this article argues that under the auspices of the Anthropocene, the assumptions and goals of societal resilience become problematic. This is because external interventions often ignore feedback effects, meaning that attempts to resolve problems through focusing upon enabling and capacity-building can be seen as counterproductive “fire-fighting” rather than tackling causation. Even more “alternative” or “community-based” approaches, relying upon interventions to enable so-called “natural” processes, either through an emphasis on local and traditional knowledge or new monitoring technologies, constitute problems for resilience advocacy: firstly, the problem of unrecognized exploitation; and secondly, the problem of continuing to sacrifice others to maintain unsustainable Western modes of consumption and production.

Assessing smallholder preferences for incentivised climate-smart agriculture using a discrete choice experiment

The promotion of climate smart agriculture (CSA) techniques to increase farmer resilience against climate change and improve their livelihoods is high on the international development agenda and aims to help achieve Sustainable Development Goals of food security (SDG 2), climate resilience and mitigation (SDG 13). We present the results of a discrete choice experiment (DCE) conducted in face-to-face interviews. In a study in Malawi, farmers responded to a series of questions about different cropping techniques and tree planting options to improve soil fertility and climate change resilience. A combination of financial and non-financial incentives was proposed to increase adoption and success rates. The results show that for different policy objectives, different climate smart packages are suitable. Our results demonstrate that farmers prefer options that secure the production of maize and include crops with both domestic use and local markets. The drought-resistant crop sorghum was unpopular among respondents; achieving SDG 13 through this CSA approach would therefore require high incentive payments. If CSA is to help achieve multiple goals e.g. poverty and inequality reduction (SDGs 1 and 10) as well as SDGs 2 and 13, a range of CSA packages, with different types of crops, rotation versus intercropping techniques and incentive levels, should be offered to smallholders.

Probabilistic decision-support framework for community resilience: Incorporating multi-hazards, infrastructure interdependencies, and resilience goals in a Bayesian network

A probabilistic decision support framework is developed in this study for community resilience planning under multiple hazards using performance goals based guidelines such as the Oregon Resilience Plan and the National Institute of Standards and Technology Community Resilience Planning Guide. Herein, resilience of community infrastructure systems is defined as the joint probability of achieving robustness and rapidity based performance goals, which is quantified using Bayesian networks. The framework assesses the effects of decision support options such as selection of hazards, resilience goals, and mitigation (ex-ante) and response (ex-post) strategies to identify measures that can improve infrastructure performance to meet community defined resilience goals. This framework is applied for resilience assessment of building, transportation, water, and electric power infrastructure systems in Seaside, Oregon, under combined earthquake ground shaking and tsunami inundation hazards corresponding to different return periods. Uncertainties in damage, restoration, and economic losses are explicitly considered and propagated in the framework using Monte Carlo simulation (MCS). The MCS results are then used to inform the Bayesian network, which evaluates the joint resilience of infrastructure systems in Seaside. Results highlight the impact of considering different performance goals, introduction of ex-ante and ex-post measures, and interdependencies between various infrastructure systems on infrastructure resilience.

Planning for water resilience: Competing agendas among Cape Town’s planners and water managers

Facing acute water challenges, the City of Cape Town has to reconcile the goal of building resilience to increasingly pronounced climate change impacts, including drought, with the persistent need to deliver equitable services and to achieve socially and environmentally just outcomes. In so doing, Cape Town is actively leveraging ideas of resilience in dealing with acute water shortages and in planning for new approaches for water management in the future. In light of multiple and discordant approaches to building resilience to water risks, this paper traces the emergence of an unfolding water resilience agenda in Cape Town. Specifically, the paper investigates how different framings of resilience enable planners to consider and prioritize particular solutions, their implications for water planning, and how lessons from Cape Town’s experiences might apply to other contexts. The findings demonstrate the predominance of expert-driven and technocratic approaches in Cape Town’s resilience-building efforts in the water sector, as well as the presence of key tensions and potential synergies emerging from competing perspectives on water resilience.

A grey-based DEMATEL model for building collaborative resilience in supply chain

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the phenomenon of collaborative resilience through in-depth case study research in India. This study endeavours to identify and model the critical success factors of collaborative resilience.Design/methodology/approachEight critical success factors of collaborative resilience were identified through literature search. Modelling and analysis of these factors was conducted using grey-based DEMATEL method. Data were collected from supply chain experts in Indian industries.FindingsIt was found that organizational factors like top management commitment and resilience system design exhibit highest causality on the entire system. Also, co-adaptive transformation and resilience goal alignment are most important for managers. Overall, this research provides a guideline and mechanism to build collaborative resilience in supply chains.Practical implicationsThrough the identification of eight critical success factors, this research has related and grounded the concept of collaborative resilience into pre-exiting supply chain practices and concepts. Through rigorous quantitative modelling and analysis of these factors, this research provides a guideline to managers for building collaborative resilience in supply chains.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that has proposed the concept of collaborative resilience in supply chain and has conducted empirical research on the phenomenon in India.

Assessing “green” and “resilient” building features using a purposeful systems approach

There is significant overlap between the goals of two urban imperatives – sustainability and resilience – and current research highlights synergies. However, few studies are able to test this assumption under disruptive conditions. This paper questions the relevance of green building features to support resilience during a disruption, relying on fieldwork conducted at a green multifamily building before and after the 2012 Hurricane Sandy. Findings indicate that the building fared well during the storm, but much of the green infrastructure was bypassed during preparations; thus, the building performed largely as a conventional building. Although green features can potentially provide redundancies or substitutes for several building services, the characteristics that fostered the successful performance of the study building during the storm – effective building management, a superior location, and residents with resources – outweighed the importance of the green infrastructure. This finding highlights the need to redefine the goals of sustainability and resilience to ensure synergies. It identifies highly trained, empowered operating staff as the key. This research posits that current views of resilience can be expanded to include purposeful systems, or a system's ability to continue to serve its end-users’ specific purposes while in an atypical state, even during a shock.

A comparative analysis of governance and leadership in agricultural development policy networks

Abstract Agricultural development initiatives feature many public and private organizations working together across sectors and scales to pursue the goals of food security and climate resilience. Policy networks are considered a crucial ingredient for the learning and cooperation needed to effectively implement agricultural development projects and increase community resiliency, yet very little comparative empirical data has been collected to assess where and how these networks operate. We contribute to filling this gap by characterizing the governance and leadership patterns within agricultural development policy networks that connect organizations working on climate resilience and food security activities in 14 smallholder farming communities across 11 countries in East Africa, West Africa and South Asia. We integrate theories of network governance and leadership in international development settings with social network analysis methods to analyze network structures and understand the roles of various actors working collaboratively toward agricultural development goals. We present two critical findings that advance our theoretical understanding of network governance and have implications for agricultural development policy globally. First, we find evidence for three distinct network types: shared and brokered networks, as predicted by the network governance literature, as well as a class of fragmented networks that exhibit extremely low levels of coordination at their core. Additionally, we find that while the presence of international development organizations is associated with greater overall network coordination, it is local and regional organizations that fill central network leadership positions most frequently. These findings suggest that resources may be an important factor in overcoming the cost of coordination, but social capital among local actors may be more important for developing network leadership.

A Coupled Human–Natural Systems Framework of Community Resilience

This article compares and contrasts resilience frameworks to identify commonalities and gaps. It proposes use of a coupled human-natural systems framework (CHNS) to analyze community resilience to disasters. CHNS builds on the human ecosystem model that analyzes how institutions and social order shape fluxes and flows of resources between and within social and environmental systems. It expands on the model by including anthropological concepts of culture, agency, power, and discourse. The framework covers environmental and social legacies, pre-disaster trends and conditions, resilience measures, and system changes provoked by a disaster. The article proposes eleven categories of variables that affect resilience and discusses research steps for putting the framework into action. The CHNS framework can be used to predict system changes and identify resilience measures that allow communities to articulate and achieve their resilience goals.

Vine performance and wine composition of ‘Chardonnay’ in relation to organic soil amendment in Mediterranean environment

Preservation and improvement of soil organic matter content in vineyards are key goals of agroecosystem resilience against climate change and its negative effects on grapevine water status and vine physiology. There is still a lack of information on the effects of organic amendments on grapevine functions and yield performance. The following research was carried out during the 2016 season in a commercial 'Chardonnay' vineyard located in Apulia region according to a randomized block design, where one factor of fertilization (commercial composted municipal solid organic wastes) was tested. Treatments were: no fertilized control vines (NFC), moderate fertilized vines (D1) at rate of 1 kg vine-1 of organic amendment (4.3 t ha(-1), at the rate of 86 kg N ha(-1)), high fertilized vines (D2) at rate of 1.5 kg vine-1 (6.6 t ha(-1), 132 kg N ha(-1)). The leaf gas exchange during growing season did not show significant differences in terms of net CO(2) assimilation, stomatal conductance, transpiration and water use efficiency. However, lower leaf temperature on D1 and D2 vines was measured. Vines fertilized with organic amendment showed a better water status during the warmest summer days since organic compounds improve the soil-water holding capacity. Monthly field measurements of the greenness of the leaves (SPAD index) revealed the highest green color intensity of leaves by D2 treatments (+11%) to be related to the highest nitrogen amount. Compared to unfertilized vines, D2 vines (high amendment dose) determined a significant increase in yield per vine (+21%) in relation to the highest cluster weight. At harvest, grapes had the same chemical composition with no differences in term of sugar content and pH, while an increment of titratable acidity on D1 and D2 vines was noted. Wines of different treatments have shown similar chemical parameters (alcohol content, titratable acidity and pH). Our preliminary results indicated that application of a high level of soil organic amendment on 'Chardonnay' vines increased grapevines yield while improving soil properties (soil organic content and water retention), contrasting summer drought effect on vines in a Mediterranean environment.

Benefits of continuity models of care in building mutual support and nurturing between women and midwifery students. Does continuity of care foster clinical confidence, emotional resilience and influence career goals?

Benefits of continuity models of care in building mutual support and nurturing between women and midwifery students. Does continuity of care foster clinical confidence, emotional resilience and influence career goals?