Earthquakes, blockades and energy crises: A conceptual framework for energy systems resilience applied to Nepal

“I hope they shouldn't happen”: Social vulnerability and resilience to urban energy disruptions in a digital society in Scotland

“…Notions of energy resilience can be traced back to work on systems resilience in the field of ecology in the 1970s [13], although its recent popularity in energy systems research may partly stem from its acknowledgement of the need to be able to withstand the unexpected [14]. Although resilience is not inherently positive or negative (for example, undesirable structures such as poverty traps can be extremely resilient to change [15,16]), energy research generally views resilience as a desirable attribute, particularly in situations of high uncertainty [17].…”

“…Understanding people's resilience means also understanding vulnerability. Vulnerability of communities exposed to hazards is broadly defined as "the propensity to be adversely affected", and encompasses a variety of elements including sensitivity and susceptibility (for instance, social characteristics which mean that certain groups may be more affected), and 'adaptive capacity' (the ability to respond and recover from an event) [15,[33][34][35]. Vulnerability is not straightforwardly the flipside of resilience, although there is still some debate over this [36]; yet the two concepts can be highly complementary, both emphasising the importance of identifying opportunities for risk reduction, coping, and adaptation [37].…”

Visualizing Nepal’s electricity supply resilience from a whole-systems perspective: A participatory approach

“…Moreover, the paper illustrates how the method provides insights into the ways energy resilience is understood in practice, and the potential implications of this for policymaking towards resilience. Our focus here is on electricity supply resilience in Nepal. In the past, Nepal has experienced electricity supply disruption not only due to natural disasters and political shocks, such as the Gorkha earthquake in 2015 [9,10,11] and the India-Nepal border blockade between 2015 and 2016 [10,11], but also due to lack of electricity supply access (especially in rural areas), and instability; using load-shedding to prevent the electricity system from overloading during peak demand [12,13,14]. This makes Nepal a fruitful case for exploring the ways in which electricity supply resilience is understood and ways in which interconnections between variables can be identified to explore potential avenues for future action towards resilience.…”

“…However, the ambiguity also makes it difficult to understand resilience empirically and to operationalise in support of steering policy approaches [18,19,23,24,25,26]. The concept of energy resilience is increasingly discussed in the literature [11]. In taking a whole-systems approach to the concept, there is the potential to consider a multitude of different issues and factors.…”

“…Also, demand for electricity, including different socio-economic factors that might influence such demand (and the level and type of supply), for example access to a particular service. Moreover, electricity systems comprise both physical and non-physical components, are extraordinarily complex, and often under multiple external stresses [11,27,28]. In turn, it is important to recognise that electricity supply resilience is influenced by factors across multiple sectors and scales.…”