Rethinking Infrastructure Network Criticality for Climate Resilience: Inputs from Complexity Sciences and Disaster Risk Theory

Abstract Critical infrastructure (CI) functions and spatial boundaries are often implicit premises which can result in misalignments between CI resilience goals and their societal utility. Furthermore, the historical legacy and institutionalization of CI, powered by national security issues, has resulted in technocentric approaches of infrastructure systems that can be counterproductive to disaster risk reduction. Through a literature review, this paper argues that rethinking concepts of infrastructure network criticality quantitatively and qualitatively is a necessary step to address this misalignment and to apply the current paradigm shift which defines CI, beyond hardware, as sociotechnical and socioecological systems. Rethinking these concepts of criticality requires a reexamination of infrastructure networks functions and spatial boundaries. Complementary approaches to CI resilience are harnessed within two large and sometimes disconnected bodies of literature: complexity sciences and disaster risk theories. Complexity sciences have significantly advanced quantitative definitions of infrastructure criticality by modeling interconnectivity and extracting network level metrics of vulnerability and resilience. At a conceptual level, complexity sciences further revolutionized our understanding of CI as complex adaptive systems through the idea of ecological resilience and panarchical cycles of stasis and change. Nevertheless, the application of ecological resilience to CI risk management still struggles to recognize and assess sociotechnical functions of complex systems, for which disaster risk theories have a latent potential to address, notably within concepts of social construct of risk and the vulnerability paradigm. This theoretical bridge helps realign infrastructure network criticality with CI services and ecological resilience goals. In a practical level, it converges contributions from multiple fields and provides direction for assessing sociotechnical network exposure to climate change threats and identifying network-level organizational stakeholders to support CI collaborative risk governance.

Συνεδρία: 
Authors: 
Sarah Lindbergh and John Radke
Room: 
1
Date: 
Friday, December 11, 2020 - 18:30 to 18:45

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