Building resilience in times of new global challenges : a focus on six main attributes

Abstract

This work discusses the crucial concept of resilience in six specific paragraphs, starting from the grid of the main attributes (namely, safety, robustness, adaptive capacity, sustainability, governance, and anamnesis) proposed by Indirli (2019). This study found that two views were particularly challenging, however conflicting: the homeostatic approach (engineering resilience, e.g. oscillations around an initial steady state) or the autopoietic approach (ecological resilience, e.g. irreversible shifts towards a new situation).

In fact, a reliable resilience’s assessment is fundamental when geohazards affect the environment, urban habitat, building construction, lifelines and heritage. The reason of this study is also due to the increasing ambiguity whereby the term is frequently used in multidisciplinary fields, as engineering, social-economical/social-ecological systems and disaster/risk assessment in case of catastrophic scenarios.

Therefore, considering the urgent need of analysis tools to prevent/properly govern future crises, the authors intend to give a useful hint towards the adoption of resilient approaches. The original and captivating methodology developed here confirms and enhances the validity of the starting point cornerstones (modifying and fulfilling the initial definitions), in primis the relationship between the resilience’s main concept and its attributes. Hence, the final goal is to provide an effective framework to study, without rigidity, complex questions in times of new global challenges, as the combination of natural and anthropogenic hazards, with particular reference to geohazards and global warming. Thus, successful actions focused on risk mitigation (with a tight link to communication, dissemination and exploitation policies) can be implemented, aimed at enhancing consciousness about disasters, for a wide range of different organizations, from experts in risk management and preservation of environment/heritage to people and stakeholders concerned.

The investigation carried out here has been supported interlacing a theoretical discussion with the analysis of specific case studies (e.g. the behaviour of buildings, infrastructure and heritage under earthquakes and volcanic eruptions). It is to be noted that this approach has been already adopted to evaluate the overall resilience of the Italian community during the first period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Such a tragic event has certainly been a very hard test, where resilience should be considered as a strategic indicator, proving that really short time to operate effective choices is available, being the humanity able or not to govern the next changes, hopefully towards enough resilient results.