Resilience

The occurrence of disasters and crises, following both extreme natural events and technology-related accidents, demonstrates the limitations of traditional risk assessment and management. In the context of risk, resilience has been discussed as both a supplement and an alternative to conventional risk management. On the side of governments and industry, many organisations explicitly call for resilience-based strategies to help cope with unexpected and sudden shocks.

IRGC considers that:

  • Resilience-based strategies are needed  when there is significant uncertainty about risk impacts and potential for catastrophic consequences
  • Effective resilience-based strategies must rely on sound risk assessment and complement risk management.

IRGC resource guide on resilience (2016, 2018)

In the context of its work to improve the governance of systemic or emerging risks marked by uncertainty, IRGC developed a Resource Guide on Resilience for researchers and practitioners.

This resource guide is a collection of authored pieces including annotated bibliographies. All together, the pieces review existing concepts, approaches and illustrations or case-studies for comparing, contrasting and integrating risk and resilience, and for developing resilience. The guide is designed to help scientists and practitioners working on risk governance and resilience evaluation. It stresses the importance of including resilience building in the process of governing risk, including in research, policy, strategies, and practices. It further emphasises the need to develop metrics and quantitative approaches for resilience assessment and instruments for resilience management.

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Dr Igor Linkov (Risk and Decision Science Team Lead, US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, and Adjunct Professor of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University), Marie-Valentine Florin (IRGC) and Benjamin Trump (ORISE Fellow, US Army Engineer Research and Development Center) served as coordinators and editors for this collection of authored pieces.

Resilience and insurance (2019)

Insurance can play a role in resilience management, complementing more conventional forms of risk management, especially to cope with unexpected risks. Conducted in the context of the SmartResilience Horizon 2020 project and with the Swiss Re Institute, IRGC’s analysis points to a potential tension between acknowledging that resilience is useful for grappling with uncertainty and inability to quantify risk (or standardize risk measurement), and a basic principle and requirement from insurance, which is that the assessment of a critical infrastructure resilience should provide a measurable outcome.

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