Creating a Science of Community Resilience to Better Model It - Scott Miles
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2013 EERI Annual Meeting Session: Modeling Resilience
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Creating a Science of Community Resilience to Better Model It - Scott Miles
- 23. Carbon vs. Carbon
Editor's Notes
- For my talk, I'm going to fly up to the 10,000 foot level. I think we need to take this view in order to improve the engineering of models, indicators, and metrics that many of us are working. While most of you are engineers and not scientists, I want to create a demand and desire in you to push researchers to put more effort into advancing a science of community disaster resilience.
- Of course, there's been a lot of work to this point in various disciplines in trying define resilience or come up with various types of conceptual frameworks for it. Materials science, psychology, and ecology all have their particular focus on resilienceWhile it's fine to be inspired by those disciplines, we need to remember that the resilience they focus on is for their particular science. What we do is different; we look the impacts of disasters to communities. Let's recognize that community disaster resilience is its own unique science.
- This is a frequency analysis of 100 references from my database that have the word disaster and resilience in the title or abstract. We seem to think there isn't agreement about the definition of community disaster resilience. But we are. And here it is. This is our consensus. We need to move beyond just word-smithing linguistic definitions of what resilience is for us. To create a science of community resilience, we need to put a lot of effort into building theory. We need to evaluate whether words, such as these, are the right variables and what the relationships are between all of them.The science of quantum physics is not just a bunch of sentences defining what quantum physics is. It is based on a structured, tested, and revised theory that incorporate systematic variables and constructs. One could argue that our science is more difficult, but we still need to put work into theory building.
- Luckily, we have many colleagues -- some in the room -- who have worked hard at creating frameworks for facilitating the measuring and modeling of resilience related to disasters. This one most of you are familiar with because it is the most cited framework in the disaster literature. It is based on the work from MCEER and Bruneau and others. It represents resilience as a dynamic process, with an emphasis on recovery.
- Perhaps less of you are familiar with this one, but it is the second most cited framework in the literature. This is the work of Fran Norris and others. It represents resilience as a static phenomena, focusing on the capacity to recover. Unlike the other framework, it doesn't focus on the dynamics, processes, and outcomes of resilience. It provides lots of insight into what goes into creating resilience and what are the important things to pay attention to as far indicators and metrics.
- So we have a starting point for building theory. And I'd argue that if we don't put more effort into advancing a theory of community resilience, our enthusiasm for resilience is likely to wain when our metrics and models don't meet expectations.Starting from the work of Bruneau and Norris and others, as well as other work and my own contributions, I'd like to propose a more systematic and comprehensive theory of resilience.
- So we're back to the word cloud. It's for fun, but it really is a great way to see where we are.Take a closer look. What do you not see that you think we should?I don't see anything about meaningful, human goals. Not well-being, not health, not needs, not happiness, not satisfaction.Sure, most of us are engineers, but we're civil engineers and our goal is to meet human needs. So human needs must be included in our science and ultimately in some of our models.
- You'll quickly notice that the theory I'm presenting is not a simple one. It shouldn't be. My point today is not to explain it, it's just to briefly introduce it.I refer to this theoretical framework as WISC for the four major static variables in the framework -- well-being, identity, services, and capitals. So you'll notice that I am including variables that aren't explicit in current conceptual frameworks -- community well-being and community identity. You'll also notice that I define infrastructure in a fairly unique way. Infrastructure is any combination of capitals and services. The ordering of the figure is loosely intentional. Basically, it is that community is founded on top of infrastructure.
- The variable of capitals has been included in some way or another in several disaster resilience frameworks. There isn't agreement on what particular constructs of capital should be included but that is really context dependent, anyway. What's most important here is that natural capital is the foundation of all other capital. And built capital translates natural capital to the other types of capital. Also important is that, within this framework, built capital, like power networks or buildings, are not referred to as infrastructure because infrastructure requires both capital and service. As well, there is more than technological, built infrastructure. For example, there is social infrastructure, which is the combination of social capital and social services.
- Services are what people want and need to ultimately derive well-being. Different capital can provide the same or similar services, like light rail vs. roads for mobility or solar arrays vs. a wind farm for electricity. Considering infrastructure as the combination of a service and the capitals that are required to create the service allows us to easily represent solutions such as substitution, whether temporary or permanent. The constructs I have listed are what I consider to be a bare minimum for defining the character of an instance of infrastructure. The details of each construct are not important now.
- From infrastructure comes the potential to enable community.The interface between infrastructure and community are a community's identity and the services used to maintain that identity. Identity is comprised of many of the constructs from the literature on resilience capacity, such as Norris and others. During the recovery process, community members are worried about the identity of their lives being radically and negatively altered. Sure, there will be significant changes, for example to restore infrastructure and population. But people derive identity through more complex and nuanced constructs than just what their environment is filled with--people, buildings, and lifelines.
- Fortunately for us there is a lot of rigorous research linking several of the constructs of identity to constructs of well-being.For example there is ample evidence that equity and esteem correlate with measures of human health. Within the human and community psychology literature there is somewhat agreement on at least a common denominator set of constructs that make up well-being.
- All of that -- capitals, services, identity, and well-being -- give us a vocabulary to help us understand and measure resilience, as well as how aspects of resilience are structured. Of course, all of those variables have dynamic paths in space and time, both before and after a hazard event. While this is a complex diagram, the point is that to understand resilience we have to understand how it behaves across multiple scales because people move and different infrastructure exist or operate at different levels. We also have to keep track of not just physical interdependencies, but the interdependencies between systems of well-being, identity, services and capitals.
- These interdependencies are part of a metabolism in every town and city.It's this metabolism that propels life and well-being in human settlements.
- It all starts with infrastructure and the functional relationships between services and the capitals they are derived from.
- What we care about ultimately is how urban metabolism effects people, recognizing that people are agents within a system and can play many positive and negative roles.
- The functional relationships between people and infrastructure are familiar to us.Slide 18
- The relationships are different depending on if they are between capitals, services, or infrastructure as a whole.
- The combination of all of these simple, familiar relationships at multiple scales, applied to multiple communities and infrastructure results in a web of wickedly complex, adaptive systems.
- However, obviously these systems are inherently vulnerable and can experience damage, disruption, and harm.
- Which is why we are concerned about resilience and the ability for communities to recover. This gets us to the tricky game of defining recovery.We are all aware of multiple definitions of recovery. It could be bouncing back to the pre-disaster state. It could be achieving some forecasted state without a disaster. Or it could be some difficult to measure, new, and maybe better normal.
- There is also the tension between speed and quality of recovery. The construct of rapidity suggests that the faster the recovery the better. But there are many cases when this is not true. An example might be that if one goes slow to sort debris, then reuse and recycling is possible so that less carbon is wasted.
- Efficiency resilience is what I call defining recovery based on the speed that various indicators of supply return to some absolute state.This is important, but a lot of the troubles in defining recovery go away if we adopt the perspective of sufficiency resilience.Sufficiency resilience pays attention to when supply and demand come into relative balance, while minimizing negative externalities in the process of recovery.
- I refer to this theoretical framework as the WISC framework because of the inclusion of well-being, identity, services, and capitals. But I also talked about three other important variables: metabolism, geography, and sufficiency. Each of these variables have some bare minimum number of constructs that characterize them, listed here.The point is to evaluate whether these are the right variables and the right constructs, and figure out how they all relate.
- By doing this, we can take various slices of the theory to establish and evaluate our indicators and metrics to use in practice. You can take this table and add a third dimension of temporal resolution and then a fourth dimensions of identity constructs and a fifth dimension of service constructs. The goal of our science then is to proposal, model, and evaluate indicators and metrics for each cell created by this multi-dimensional matrix.
- So planners need ways of measuring and modeling the potential long-term outcomes of decisions made after a hazard event. They need ways of exploring how to minimize carbon impacts, evaluate the benefit of demand management or temporary supplies, or avoid issues of social justice. For the past several years I have been working on a computer model called ResilUS. This model represents businesses and households recovering from damage and loss. The purpose of the model is to facilitate better planning and incorporate much of the theoretical and empirical knowledge like I have described so far. ResilUS generally operates using fragility curves to determine probability of recovery progress based on some function of other recovery indicators. This probability is compared to random numbers each time step – referred to as montecarlo simulation. Each time the probability of recovery progress exceeds the random number, the indicator value increases.
- Like all science, theory has to be developed and tested in order to facilitate engineering and modeling. All models are wrong and so the best ones are tied to theory so that the models can be used to gain further insight into the collective knowledge in the theory. And like all theories, what I presented to you is, of course, provisional and has to be evaluated and revised so we can better model community resilience to disasters.