Risk management is not enough: a conceptual model for resilience and adaptation-based vulnerability assessments

Abstract

The US government has focused considerable attention on enhancing our society's ability to protect critical systems and services from disruptive events. Over the past decade, federal agencies have bolstered their efforts to identify and minimize threats using traditional risk-based approaches such as continuity of operations and disaster risk reduction processes. However, these valuable risk identification and management tools are limited because they rely upon foreseeable factor analyses of steady-state systems with predictable hazard frequencies and severities. In assessing the capability of complex adaptive systems to cope with disruptions, an overemphasis upon engineering resilience through risk management and planning for what is predictable may cloud or detract from our efforts to better understand a system's emergent capabilities to withstand disruptions that are unforeseeable. This article contends that augmenting traditional risk approaches through the incorporation of methodologies grounded in socio-ecological system (SES) resilience principles offers a potential avenue for improving our agencies' abilities to assess and manage both known and unknown risks. We offer a notional rationale for broadening our examination of system vulnerabilities and present a conceptual model that combines engineering and SES resilience paradigms to facilitate the identification, assessment, and management of system vulnerabilities. The Military Installation Resilience Assessment model described herein applies risk and resilience principles to evaluate whole systems, focusing on interconnections and their functionality in facilitating response and adaptation.

A multi-objective location-allocation optimization for sustainable management of municipal solid waste

“…In hazardous waste treatment facility, the risk level is usually formulated proportionally to the population exposed and waste amount. However, more environmental indicators should be measured for a MSW management facility, i.e., noise, water pollution, hazmat emissions, etc., and some affected points may be more sensitive to a certain type of MSW treatment technology, further, the resilience and vulnerability may also be taken into account (Sikula et al, 2015). Due to this reason, the development of a generic and systematic multi-criteria framework for quantifying the environmental impact of MSW treatment facility is of significant importance.…”

Black Swan Event Assessment for Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri

“…One of them, a model called Military Installation Resilience Assessment (MIRA) was developed for examining resilience of military installations on low-probability events (Sikula et al 2015). The assessment combines social, ecological, and physical resilience as well as risk management techniques to identify sensitive areas and formulate solutions that include adaptation.…”

Benchmarking agency and organizational practices in resilience decision making

“…The Military Installation Resilience Assessment (MIRA) model is still in the conceptual phase but intends to guide performance of a hazardspecific risk assessment that subsequently expanded to include a scenario analysis for the potential altered states resulting from the hazard. It further incorporates a processmapping step to explicitly identify dependencies and feedback loops of system components, a stakeholder analysis, and an assessment of cost-effectiveness of potential solutions (Sikula et al 2015).…”

“…The final resilience scores are determined on a scale of 1-7 based on comparison of assessed criteria with narrative definitions of resilience thresholds for those criteria. The end goal is a consistent method and scale on which to base management decisions related to mission-critical systems (Sikula et al 2015).…”