Risk-Resilience Feedback to Assure Critical Societal Functions

Increase in compound natural and man-made extreme events, and growing interconnectedness of critical societal functions emphasize further understanding of interactions between elements of risk and resilience. While conceptual frameworks have mapped quantified risks to the failure of critical societal functions, feedback from failure and recovery pathways to management of risk has not been systematically considered yet. In this brief perspective, we revisit the risk-resilience feedback paradigm in the context of connected critical societal functions and discuss its role in advancing science-informed disaster policy development. Specifically, we focus on connecting robustness and recovery elements of resilience to the management of risk elements, including threat, vulnerability, and consequence. Furthermore, we briefly describe a notional networked supply chain system example to illustrate how robustness and recovery measures can inform elements of risk. Understanding interactions between elements of risk and resilience is not a fully solved problem. Extending these concepts in the context of connected natural-built-human systems subject to compound and cascading risks is an open challenge. This discussion represents steps toward addressing these challenges.