Resilience

Resilience management goes beyond risk management to address the complexities of large integrated systems and the uncertainty of future threats, especially those associated with climate change.

Unprecedented losses associated with adverse events such as natural disasters and cyber-attacks have focused attention on new approaches to mitigating damages.

Existing community resilience assessment methods lack explicit reference to temporality of disruptive events and often use standard metrics that may not be universally appropriate. Linkov et al.’s (Environ Sci Technol 47(18):10108–10110, 2013a; Environ Syst Decis 33(4):471–476, 2013b) Resilience Matrix (RM) framework utilizes local stakeholder-informed metrics aligned with the temporal stages of the National Academy of Science definition of disaster resilience. Here we demonstrate the application of the RM to coastal community resilience at Rockaway Peninsula, New York.

Building resilience into today's complex infrastructures is critical to the daily functioning of society and its ability to withstand and recover from natural disasters, epidemics, and cyber-threats. This study proposes quantitative measures that capture and implement the definition of engineering resilience advanced by the National Academy of Sciences. The approach is applicable across physical, information, and social domains. It evaluates the critical functionality, defined as a performance function of time set by the stakeholders.

Recent directives from the US Office of the President have detailed the need for resilience in the face of increased security threats and natural disasters. While these documents call for resilience improvements, no guiding framework for the assessment of resilience exists. Federal agencies are then deriving individual ways to address resilience, resulting in a series of parallel efforts instead of one national cohesive effort. This paper summarizes the portfolio of current efforts implemented by agencies to guide the integration of resilience assessment across the federal government.

The cities in Southeast Asian and Small Island Developing States have distorted the natural environment by haphazardly constructing roads, buildings, and other infrastructures. Such massive changes in the environment are altering the ecology, creating sustainable development challenges such as climate-related extreme weather events. Super Typhoon Haiyan devastated portions of Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, on November 8, 2013, that caused physical and psychological illnesses to the affected.

This paper provides a framework for assessing empirical patterns of urban disaster recovery through the use of statistical indicators. Such a framework is needed to develop systematic knowledge on how cities recover from disasters. The proposed framework addresses such issues as defining recovery, filtering out exogenous influences unrelated to the disaster, and making comparisons across disparate areas or events. It is applied to document how Kobe City, Japan, recovered from the catastrophic 1995 earthquake.

This study explores disaster experiences and preparedness of the disaster affected Orang Asli families in Tasik Chini, Malaysia. Applying a qualitative research approach, this study was collected data from 10 respondents from 10 families based on convenient sampling and in-depth interview. This study utilises thematic analysis to analyse and report the data. This study revealed that Orang Asli families faced both positive and negative experiences due to disaster. Moreover, disaster preparedness of the families was found to be low.

2020 has become the year of coping with COVID-19. This year was to be the “super year” for sustainability, a year of strengthening global actions to accelerate the transformations required for achieving the 2030 agenda. We argue that 2020 can and must be a year of both. Thus we call for more utilisation of the health-emergency disaster risk management (Health-EDRM) framework to complement current responses to COVID-19 and the patent risk of similar phenomena in the future. To make our case, we examine current responses to COVID-19 and their implications for the SFDRR.

The indomitable spirit of growth of mankind has led to rapid urbanisation, steered by industries and corporates. While globalisation and development mark the good face of the consequential coin, increased frequency of extreme events and disaster risks along with the phenomenon of climate change, marks the dark face of the same coin. Each time the society takes a catastrophic hit, humanity begs to question the role of corporate in disaster mitigation, management and rehabilitation.