This document discusses the concept of resilience in natural and infrastructure systems. It begins by defining resilience in natural systems as including persistence of relationships, absorption of shocks, reorganization during change, and avoidance of critical transitions. For infrastructure systems, resilience means continuity of function, rapid recovery, and tolerable loss. The document then examines examples of resilience, or lack thereof, in responses to the 2010 Haiti earthquake and 2011 Japan earthquake. It argues that location in a system's "phase space" is important. Later sections discuss frameworks for quantitatively assessing community resilience, and generic indicators of loss of resilience prior to tipping points. Overall the document takes a broad view of resilience as the ability of systems to cope with or adapt to stresses
Related topics: