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Abstract
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The global COVID-19 pandemic has prompted policy makers to reassess the operations and management of society's critical functions, including infrastructure, health care services, supply chains, and emergency response. With COVID-19 as a backdrop, planning and response activities must continue to occur to be able to effectively deploy resources for other disasters which may unfold simultaneously. For example, the concurrence of severe hurricanes and the global pandemic presents unique challenges for disaster management.
The presence of concurrent threats requires an approach that considers both risk and resilience. While risk analysis answers the questions "what can go wrong?", "how likely is it?", and "what are the consequences?", risk analysis can only yield benefits in situations where one can reasonably predict the likelihood and consequences of an adverse event. In many emerging threat environments, or where there are multiple threats, it becomes difficult to parameterize the models necessary to conduct a reliable risk assessment. Resilience take a different and complementary approach, by considering how a system can plan/prepare, absorb, recover, and adapt to disruptions in such a way as to minimize the effect to critical system functions. Taking a resilience approach does not seek to identify every possible threat, but instead allocates resources to designing and protecting the system in such a way as to be able to bounce back quickly from disruptions. Risk and Resilience have been central themes of this Journal, including the topic of multiple Special Issues, including Volume 35, Issue 2 (Linkov et al. 2015) and Volume 38, Issue 3 (Kete et al. 2018). Risk and resilience have been discussed in other books and publications as well (see Linkov and Trump 2019 for review).
COVID-19 has unearthed some of the same issues discussed in the disaster assessment and management literature. While the previous special issue was focused on COVID-19, this issue of Environment Systems & Decisions presents a collection of papers which focus on various aspects of risk and resilience related to disaster management. These disasters include natural (e.g., severe weather events) and manmade (e.g., cyber threats, pipeline explosions) examples. Moreover, resilience is examined from the perspective of protecting against these discrete events, as well as long-term trends, such as climate change. These papers echo patterns from disaster management literature that can be useful in understanding and managing COVID-19...
Keywords: Pipeline transportation
Language: en |