Resilience

One of my earliest posts on economic resilience is the framework developed by Adam Rose, which defines economic resilience as the inherent and adaptive responses to hazards that enable individuals and communities to avoid some potential losses. Adam Rose has also contributed to a recent paper on transportation resilience. But perhaps resilience is not something inherently present, but rather something that is acquired through organizational learning, as Kathleen Sutcliffe  and Timothy Vogus propose?

Transportation

The speedy recovery of the transportation network is imperative to the recovery of the communities struck by any disaster, as it facilitates the supply of resources needed to cope with the event. This also brings to mind an earlier post I had on the New Zealand Lifelines Engineering Project that showed how lifeline engineering is directly related to the resilience of road networks to natural hazards and how it can be integrated into road controlling authority management practices.

Human Relief

Emergency logistics, along with humanitarian logistics are key ingredients in dealing with the aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake, as the 2006 Yogyakarta earthquake showed. On a side note, Ronaldo Tomasini and Luk van Wassenhove recently wrote a book on Humanitarian Logistics that is well worth reading.

Disasters and supply chains

Disasters. The result: Damaged infrastructure. End result: Disrupted supply chains. But how do disasters really impact supply chains? In my post on on a paper researching the impact of disasters on firms in different sectors it is shown that the kind of disaster and the place a company has in the supply chain matters considerably. I’m not sure about New Zealand’s exports and whether the earthquake will have an impact on commodity prices like the Queensland flooding had on sugar prices, but it will be interesting to follow. Here is a newspaper article on some of the economic fallouts from the previous earthquake.

Community resilience

Another matter for Christchurch now will be its community resilience. In this post it is said that in order to achieve community resilience public and private owners of critical infrastructures and key resources must work together, before, during and after a disaster. That said, the good news is that New Zealand has a research project called Resilient Organisations, which aims at assisting New Zealand organisations to recover economic competitiveness after hazard events by improving their resilience. Interestingly, after the previous earthquake, Christchurch put up a special website to assist businesses and people in how to recover: recovercanterbury.co.nz.

What now?

As I said, there’s not much I can personally from here, but having lived in Christchurch myself it is heart-wrenching to see the pictures in the news. I can only hope that Christchurch once again will rise from the rubble and show the world what resilience really means.

News links

• nzherald.co.nz: Christchurch earthquake
• vg.no: Jordskjelv på New Zealand

Related posts

• husdal.com: The Christchurch earthquake (September 2010)

Resilient organisations

I first  heard about this project in 2004, when I was a visiting researcher at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. The aim of the Resilient organisations project is to assist New Zealand organisations to recover economic competitiveness after hazard events by improving their resilience. More information on the project and reports for download can be found on the Resilient Organisations homepage, where they emphasize that

There is an intrinsic relationship between organisational resilience and improving the resilience of communities. Enabling the continued operation of organisations, in and following crises, significantly impacts on the medium to long term recovery and health of the wider community. Increased resilience is also important when considering the interconnectedness of modern organisations, where disruptions can have significant and widespread impacts globally.

Resilience is viewed a 3-fold construct, working in a complex, dynamic and interconnected fashion depending on 1) keystone vulnerabilities, criticality and preparedness, 2) situation awareness, stemming from an assessment of the keystone vulnerabilities, and 3) adaptive capacity. Resilience, in essence, is the ability to survive disruptive changes despite severe impact. This post describes the interaction of the three elements that make up resilience.

New Zealand and economic resilience

Most important for recovery is economic resilience, described in my post on defining and measuring economic resilience as

the inherent and adaptive responses to hazards that enable individuals and communities to avoid some potential losses. It can take place at the level of the firm, household, market, or macroeconomy.

Economic resilience emphasizes ingenuity and resourcefulness applied during and after the event. Economic resilience has a behavioral emphasis. It focuses on the fact that individuals and organizations do not simply react passively and simply wait for (government) help and rescue in the face of a disaster. Is New Zealand prepared for this event? If they have put into practice what they learned from the Resilient organisations” project, I think they are.

New Zealand and transportation resilience

When disaster strikes, how does the transportation network recover? The transportation network is essential to many smaller and remoter communities, and as I learned in a session at the TRB 2009 conference, because

the restoration of the transportation network is also the key to the restoration of the economy and the society, not just the infrastructure.

This brings to mind an earlier post on the New Zealand Lifelines Engineering Project that defined lifeline engineering as

a collaborative inter-utility and cross-sector planning process to reduce the pre- and  postemergency impacts of low probability disaster-scale events.

The project report shows how lifeline engineering is directly related to the resilience of road networks to natural hazards and how it can be integrated into road controlling authority management practices. The report is titled “Engineering lifelines and transport – should New Zealand be doing it better?” I hope they’ve spent the last two years actually doing it better.

Will it work?

Despite the havoc and the damage the Christchurch earthquake has caused, if I were there, I would be having a field day right now, eager to verify the conclusions of the Resilient organisations project, eager to see whether their recommendations were put into practice, and eager to find objects for my own research into supply chain resilience. Unfortunately, I can only watch from the sideline.

News links

• nzherald.co.nz: Christchurch earthquake
• starcanterbury.co.nz: Christchurch earthquake

Related

• husdal.com: Can Suply Chain Management learn from Emergency Management
• husdal.com: Resilience revisited

Prepare or react?

The first post that comes to mind is from July 2009, when I happened to watch the BBC World Debate aptly titled “Disasters – Prepare or React?” The question was, should we actually bother to spend time and money on disaster mitigation, or should we rather focus on preparing for disaster recovery?  Is re-active better than pro-active? Should governments spend large sums of money on mitigation, on building up rescue and recovery capabilities, or should we rather tell people how can they can survive as long as possible if no rescue arrives, and in that manner reduce the impact? The basic message was that the government can only do so much, you have to do the rest yourself. On the other hand, the government must also provide the funds and opportunities, the legal and economical framework, for communities to prepare themselves.

Economic Resilience

In another post, dated as far back as may 2008, I  reported on how to define and measure economic resilience, a paper published by the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER), refers to the inherent and adaptive responses to  hazards that enable individuals and communities to avoid some potential losses. It can take place at the level of the firm, household, market, or macroeconomy. In contrast to the pre-event character of mitigation, economic resilience emphasizes ingenuity and resourcefulness applied during and after the event.

Personal and Organizational Resilience

Strangely enough, I have just started reading the Harvard Business Review on Building Personal and Organizational Resilience, a book I will review later. While none of the essays contained in the book deals with natural disasters as such, one of essays excellently highlights the key ingredients of resilience: 1) Reality. In the bitter end, it is not optimism that will see you through a crisis, but realism and down-to-earth views what matters for survival. 2) Meaning. Do not ask “Why” things happen, ask “Why not?” and build a bridge from the present hardships towards a brighter future. 3) Ingenuity. Make do with whatever is at hand, be a Mac Gyver, the ultimate in resilience (although the word “resilience” probably never featured even once in the TV series).

Emergency Logistics

I should also mention a recent article on Emergency Logistics that looks at logistics and risk mitigation in Thailand following the Asian tsunami, Interestingly, the Thai Disaster Prevention Master plan only implicitly underscores the need for logistics requirements, but does not state them explicitly. On the other hand, local and regional responsibilities for preparedness and response are clearly stated, mentioning that key supplies are necessary, but leaving it up to the local agencies to acquire whatever is necessary, should the need arise. Make do with what you have.

When disasters strike

…how does the transportation network recover? That was the topic of a session I attended at TRB 2009 this week last year. Although the session was mainly aimed at US transportation agencies, some key of the points work regardless of location: recovery plans need to be broad, they must include all possible hazard events and all transportation modes. Transportation recovery plans need to look beyond their mere purpose of addressing hazards in the transportation network. The transportation network is essential to many communities. This implies that the restoration of the transportation network also means the restoration of the economy and the society, not just the infrastructure.

And Haiti?

Unfortunately, Haiti is an impoverished country, one of the world’s poorest and least developed. Resilience, albeit on a different scale and with different notions of survival than in the strictest business sense, are most likely part of the daily struggle.  I’m sure that Haiti will recover, but it’s going to be a slow process. Very slow.

Further reading

More on this topic can be found on this blog under “resilience“, or on Ken Simpson’s blog Contemplating…, particularly his most recent posts that summarizes some of his ponderings on resilience.

Related

• husdal.com:  Disasters – Prepare or React?
• husdal.com: Economic resilience
• husdal.com: When disasters strike

]]> http://www.husdal.com/2010/01/13/resilience-lessons-from-the-haiti-earthquake/feed/ 0 http://www.husdal.com/2008/05/18/defining-and-measuring-economic-resilience/ http://www.husdal.com/2008/05/18/defining-and-measuring-economic-resilience/#comments Sun, 18 May 2008 14:48:25 +0000 Jan Husdal http://scrisk.wordpress.com/2008/05/18/defining-and-measuring-economic-resilience/ Economic resilience, as defined a paper published by the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER), refers to the inherent and adaptive responses to  hazards that enable individuals and communities to avoid some potential losses. It can take place at the level of the firm, household, market, or macroeconomy.

What is economic resilience?

In contrast to the pre-event character of mitigation, economic resilience emphasizes ingenuity and resourcefulness applied during and after the event. Also, while mitigation often emphasizes new technology (e.g., seismic warning) or institutions (e.g., insurance markets), resilience has greater behavioral emphasis. It focuses on the fact that individuals and organizations do not simply react passively or in a “business as usual manner” in the face of a disaster.

The measurement of resilience is important because it enables us to evaluate an important strategy for reducing economic losses from disasters, since individual companies’ supply chain resilience contribute to the overall economic resilience of a region. Failure to incorporate resilience in loss estimation will result in inflated assessments of business interruption from diasters. Failure to include resilience in policy-making will result in missed opportunities to further reduce losses.

Adam Rose, one of the proponents of the MCEER economic resilience framework has recently co-written a paper on transportation resilience. Mind you, transportation networks are an important contributor towards economic resilience, particularly when it comes to recovering from a disaster. Remember, without roads, nothing works.

Resilience is also an important issue in the New Zealand research project Resilient Organisations. Although not focusing specifically on economic resilience, there are many bearings between organisational, societal, and economic resilience.

Downloads

• buffalo.edu: Measuring economic resilience

Links

• resorgs.org.nz: Resilient organisations

Related

• husdal.com: Transportation security and resilience
• husdal.com: Engineering transportation lifelines
• husdal.com: Are roads more important than computers?