Development of a coherent definition of societal resilience and its attributes
Open access
Datum
2016-07-31Typ
- Report
ETH Bibliographie
yes
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Abstract
Ever increasing density of population and wealth increases the consequences of natural disasters. The recent natural disasters, the 2012 Hurricane Sandy, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, the 2011 Thailand floods, the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, just to name a few of the most devastating events, point to the increasing vulnerabilities of our society. The consequences of such disasters are not only immediate casualties and damage, and pain and suffering of the population, but also long-lasting changes in how people individually adapt to the post-disaster situation, and how the societies change to cope, recovery, rebuild and grow again. The deep setbacks disasters can cause, and the spring-back of the affected communities point emphatically to the importance of societal resilience for sustainable development of societies. For the purpose of this report societal resilience is defined as “the ability (of social entities: individuals, organizations or communities) to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events” (The National Academy 2012). The role of the community built infrastructure in societal resilience to natural disasters crystalized in the engineering community during the formulation of the principles of performance-based seismic design. Given the civil infrastructure system (CIS) focus of the STREST project, the link between societal resilience and the CISs of the community affected by a disaster is established first. Then, a time-varying metrics of resilience of a system is adopted in order to represent the pre-event state of the community, the phases of disaster- induced loss accumulation and absorption, followed by the recovery phase and finishing with the post-event adapted state of the community. This system resilience metric is investigated in detail, focusing on the types of metrics relevant for CISs. Then, a novel compositional supply/demand resilience quantification framework is presented. The novelty is separate tracking of the evolution of the supply of services provided by a CIS and the demand for these services by the community throughout the post-event loss accumulation, absorption and recovery phases of the community resilience process. The notion of Lack of Resilience is defined as the state when the CIS supply does not satisfy the community demand. The framework is probabilistic, in that the Lack of Resilience is a time-dependent random variable. The compositional nature of the framework stems from the bottom up process used to evaluate the instantaneous supply and demand. The process comprises the evaluation of hazard (building on outcomes of Work Package 3), evaluation vulnerability of CIS and community built infrastructure components (building on outcomes of Work Package 4), and evaluation of the operation of the CIS and community integrated system using the CIS operations model. The report concludes by a discussion on how the proposed CIS stress test methodology, ST@STREST, the principal outcome of Work Package 5 of this project, can be integrated into the regulatory framework aimed at evaluating and societal resilience and designing resilient communities in Europe. Mehr anzeigen
Persistenter Link
https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000234363Publikationsstatus
publishedVerlag
ETH ZurichThema
community resilience, societal resilience, stress testsOrganisationseinheit
03930 - Stojadinovic, Bozidar / Stojadinovic, Bozidar
Förderung
603389 - Harmonized approach to stress tests for critical infrastrctures against natural hazards (EC)
ETH Bibliographie
yes
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