Understanding and enhancing future infrastructure resiliency: a socio‐ecological approach

Abstract

It has long been recognized that the resilience of any system, whether human or natural, involves the capacity of that system to adapt its structure, although not necessarily function, to a new configuration in response to long-term socio-ecological change. Thus over the long-term, enhancing resilience involves more than simply improving the ability of a system to resist an immediate threat or recover to a stable, past state. However, despite the prevalence of adaptive notions of resilience in academic discourse, it is apparent that infrastructure planners and policies largely continue to struggle to comprehend longer-term system adaptation in their understandings of resilience. Instead a short-term, stable system perspective (STSS) on resilience is prevalent: our purpose here is to identify and problematize this perspective. In so doing, we present research that developed a heuristic 'scenario-episode' tool to address, and challenge, this STSS perspective as it plays out within the context of UK infrastructure resilience. Thus, our goal is to help resilience practitioners better understand the capacities of future infrastructure systems to respond to natural and malicious threats.

Linking critical infrastructure resilience to social vulnerability through minimum supply concepts: review of gaps and development of an integrative framework

“…Also the academic literature has a strong focus on technological perspective towards CI resilience (Pye et al 2011, Cimellaro 2014, Liu et al 2014, Pregnolato et al 2016) although some papers raise questions on shortcomings of a limited technological perspective. Sage et al (2015) call for a more socio-ecological understanding of infrastructure which is in line with Comes (2016) who claims that although communities are recognized as being at the heart of resilience, research still focuses on more 30 on responders instead of considering individuals or local communities as actors. Empirical studies on CI resilience are still rare and "still focus on activities within the boundaries of the CI" (Labaka et al 2014: 431) and much less on the "well-being of all citizens through the availability of essential goods and services" (Ridley 2011: 111), underlining the demand for more studies on community or societal group level.…”

“…Addressing these questions requires and understanding of CI systems that goes beyond the purely technical dimensions (Pye et al 2011, Sage et al 2015. However aspects of fairness of CI supply and related ethical debates are rather 15 tackled in humanitarian literature (IFRC 2011, Moodley et al 2013) but much less in CI policy (EC 2016b) and research where it seems to be a blind spot.…”

“…Grubesic & Matisziw 2013, Sage et al 2015, Pescaroli & Alexander 2016. Infrastructure for electricity, water, transport, health and law enforcement, for example, plays a critical role for the day-to-day functioning of a society.…”

Leveraging socio-ecological resilience theory to build climate resilience in transport infrastructure

“…This includes for example increasing the height and rigidity of structures; selecting more robust materials; altering maintenance regimes and building protection walls and other engineered defences (Davoudi, 2012;Klein et al, 2007;Moensch et al, 2011). Such adaptation approaches focus on achieving engineered resilience (or short-term, stable systems) through increased strength, scale, rigidity and ability to defend the asset from projected climate change impacts (Sage et al, 2015). While these approaches may reduce vulnerability to selected climate events, they may offer limited capacity to adapt to unpredictability or variance beyond this.…”

“…Important work has nonetheless been undertaken to explore the potential for ecological resilience theory to inform cities and urban development at a policy and planning level (Ahern, 2011;Meerow, 2016;Pickett, Mcgrath, Cadenasso, & Felson, 2014;Wilkinson, 2012;Wu & Wu, 2013). Infrastructure designers, constructors and managers have made strong advances in hard engineering responses to climate risk, however, these tend to focus on stability and permanence, as opposed to ongoing adaptive capacity and flexibility (Allenby & Fink, 2005;Fei, 2012;Sage, Sircar, Dainty, Fussey, & Goodier, 2015). More recently, numerous authors have highlighted the opportunity to move towards an "evolutionary" or "sustained adaptation" interpretation of resilience in engineering, though largely at a theoretical level (Woods, 2015).…”