18 Bridging the Vulnerability Paradigm to Critical Infrastructure …
337
prolonged and intensified the human impacts worsening health and living conditions
for residents in the recovery process.
7
Although measuring the relationship between infrastructure criticality and the
human impact of disaster is not trivial, cases like Hurricane Maria illustrate how the
severity of disasters are directly connected to CI resilience and the accessibility of
the population to vital goods and services. The escalating demand on disaster relief
agencies together with the lack of understanding and accommodating infrastructure
interdependencies was one of the major challenges addressed in FEMA’s 2017 AfterAction report.
18.4 CI Resilience Emergence Within DRR and Climate
Change Crisis
There are two dominant frameworks for the definition of resilience: engineering
resilience and ecological resilience (Etkin 2016). Engineering resilience comes from
Hooke’s law from physics in the seventeenth century after observation that some
bodies described as being elastic regain their shape after being deformed. Traditional
engineering resilience emphasizes efficiency, control constancy, and the return to a
previous stable state. Ecological resilience was defined following criticism to the
rigidity of the engineering framework when extrapolated to human systems such as
psychology and complex sciences such as ecology. The biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy is one of the founders of general systems theory that fed into the resilience
premise. Through the example of an organism growth, Bertalanffy proposed a mathematical model in the early 1930s with general principles of how to study complex
interacting elements in which he relies upon the isomorphism between different
fields, or general and far-reaching natural laws that drive the structure and evolution of
all systems (Bertalanffy 1950). The isomorphism premise also drives network science
to study different complex systems’ emergence and evolution through common
underlying laws that encode interactions within each intricate network (Barabási
2016).
The term resilience was coined by the ecologist Crawford. S. Holling in 1973,
where he presented the paradigm shift from stability-centered views of the behavior of
ecological systems to the persistence-centered view. Holing states that environmental
conservation challenges related to anthropogenic disturbances require this shift as
the “wellbeing of the world is not adequately described by equilibria…” but by the
populations’ capacity to absorb and accommodate unexpected disturbances. This
approach challenges the prior paradigm of ecological succession which states that
ecosystems consistently mature to stable states. Holling proposed the idea that mature
systems are commonly far from stable conditions where multiple stable states can
7 From November to December 2017, the total customer hours of lost electricity service was 3.3
million, surpassing more than three times the second largest blackout in the U.S. caused by Hurricane
Georges in 1998 (Marsters and Houser 2018).
337
prolonged and intensified the human impacts worsening health and living conditions
for residents in the recovery process.
7
Although measuring the relationship between infrastructure criticality and the
human impact of disaster is not trivial, cases like Hurricane Maria illustrate how the
severity of disasters are directly connected to CI resilience and the accessibility of
the population to vital goods and services. The escalating demand on disaster relief
agencies together with the lack of understanding and accommodating infrastructure
interdependencies was one of the major challenges addressed in FEMA’s 2017 AfterAction report.
18.4 CI Resilience Emergence Within DRR and Climate
Change Crisis
There are two dominant frameworks for the definition of resilience: engineering
resilience and ecological resilience (Etkin 2016). Engineering resilience comes from
Hooke’s law from physics in the seventeenth century after observation that some
bodies described as being elastic regain their shape after being deformed. Traditional
engineering resilience emphasizes efficiency, control constancy, and the return to a
previous stable state. Ecological resilience was defined following criticism to the
rigidity of the engineering framework when extrapolated to human systems such as
psychology and complex sciences such as ecology. The biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy is one of the founders of general systems theory that fed into the resilience
premise. Through the example of an organism growth, Bertalanffy proposed a mathematical model in the early 1930s with general principles of how to study complex
interacting elements in which he relies upon the isomorphism between different
fields, or general and far-reaching natural laws that drive the structure and evolution of
all systems (Bertalanffy 1950). The isomorphism premise also drives network science
to study different complex systems’ emergence and evolution through common
underlying laws that encode interactions within each intricate network (Barabási
2016).
The term resilience was coined by the ecologist Crawford. S. Holling in 1973,
where he presented the paradigm shift from stability-centered views of the behavior of
ecological systems to the persistence-centered view. Holing states that environmental
conservation challenges related to anthropogenic disturbances require this shift as
the “wellbeing of the world is not adequately described by equilibria…” but by the
populations’ capacity to absorb and accommodate unexpected disturbances. This
approach challenges the prior paradigm of ecological succession which states that
ecosystems consistently mature to stable states. Holling proposed the idea that mature
systems are commonly far from stable conditions where multiple stable states can
7 From November to December 2017, the total customer hours of lost electricity service was 3.3
million, surpassing more than three times the second largest blackout in the U.S. caused by Hurricane
Georges in 1998 (Marsters and Houser 2018).