Built-in resilience through disaster risk reduction: operational issues

Abstract

It has been argued that the broad range of people responsible for the delivery, operation and maintenance of the built environment need to become more proactively involved in making the built environment resilient to a wide range of known and unforeseen hazards and threats. Accordingly, the (actual and potential) roles of a wide range of stakeholders associated with the integration of Disaster Risk Reduction into the (re-)development of the built environment are examined. A review of literature, government data and interviews with key stakeholders in England, highlights that despite regulatory intentions to increase local resilience through the use of public and private sector stakeholders, a number of structural and operational obstacles exist. A range of strategies can be employed to overcome these obstacles: revisions to building codes, tightening planning policy, improving professional training, clarifying roles and missions, enabling complementary bottom-up and top-down approaches, and the provision of good practice guidance about the broad range of structural and non-structural risk reduction measures. Many of the operational challenges are non-structural and require a coherent, overarching strategy: changing and aligning the social understandings and practices in civil society, government and building environment stakeholders.

Disaster risk reduction or disaster risk production: The role of building regulations in mainstreaming DRR

“…Educational approaches can be achieved through continued professional development (CPD) type courses but also, ideally, incorporated into the professional training (i.e. undergraduate/ apprentice) of engineers, architects and planners (Bosher 2014). …”

A Systematic Review of Research on Anti-disaster Capability in Urban Disaster

“…No universally accepted concept of resilience has been established, but most scholars believed that resilience should include at least two characteristics as follows: (1) the degree of disturbance/influence of disasters and (2) the coping capability of the system. The degree of disturbance/influence of disasters is usually caused by the vulnerability of the urban system itself, which determines the resistance and adaptation of the urban system to disasters [32]. The coping capability of the system enables an urban system to minimize the effects of disasters, and it also refers to measures adopted to cope with the adverse consequences of disasters [33].…”

Coupling and quantifying resilience and sustainability in facilities management

“…Bosher (2014) distinguishes four categories of resilience, specifically (i) resistance/robustness/absorptions; (ii) recovery/"bouncing back" (iii) planning/preparing/protecting, (iv) adaptive capacity. In this paper we focus on planning/preparing/protecting, as we investigate how to improve resilience in an existing building during planned maintenance work.…”

“…Bosher defines "built in resilience" for a built environment that considers sustainability as "should be designed, located, built, operated and maintained in a way that maximises the ability of built assets, associated support systems (physical and institutional) and the people that reside or work within the built assets, to withstand, recover from, and mitigate for, the impacts of extreme natural hazards and human-induced threats" Bosher (2014). To identify the risk associated with failure of energy systems and its impact on the environment was proposed by McLellan et al (2012).…”