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. We present a critical overview on the state of resilience science within seven federal agencies and our perspective on the consistencies and disparities on how each agency is enacting presidential orders. The resulting analysis identifies differences in approaches to resilience and common ground upon which federal agencies can use to support more effective programs.
The volume and variety of manufactured chemicals is increasing, although little is known about the risks associated with the frequency and extent of human exposure to most chemicals. The EPA and the recent signing of the Lautenberg Act have both signaled the need for high-throughput methods to characterize and screen chemicals based on exposure potential, such that more comprehensive toxicity research can be informed. Prior work of Mitchell et al. using multicriteria decision analysis tools to prioritize chemicals for further research is enhanced here, resulting in a high-level chemical prioritization tool for risk-based screening. Reliable exposure information is a key gap in currently available engineering analytics to support predictive environmental and health risk assessments. An elicitation with 32 experts informed relative prioritization of risks from chemical properties and human use factors, and the values for each chemical associated with each metric were approximated with data from EPA's CP_CAT database. Three different versions of the model were evaluated using distinct weight profiles, resulting in three different ranked chemical prioritizations with only a small degree of variation across weight profiles. Future work will aim to include greater input from human factors experts and better define qualitative metrics.
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