Resilience Analysis
Resilience has become an important concept in safety and risk research and applications. The issue is how we can make a system able to sustain or restore its functionality and performance following a change in the condition of the system (disruption, threat, opportunity). Resilience analysis and management constitute a main strategy to meet threat and in particular the unforeseen and potential surprises. Many people and organizations today make a call for a shift from risk to resilience, and considerable resources are devoted to the development of methods and models for supporting resilience analysis and management. A new type of expertise is growing, professionals in resilience analysis and management are in high demand.
This is also true for the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA), where ‘resilience’ has served as a critical theme of discussion in multiple meetings, co-sponsored events, and conferences, and is a central theme of the upcoming 2019 World Congress in South Africa via the title “Development and Resilience”. Several of the current SRA Specialty Groups (SGs) address resilience analysis and management, in particular the SGs on Engineering and Infrastructure, Applied Risk Management, and Economics and Benefits Analysis. However, these SGs to not focus explicitly or extensively upon resilience within their membership, programming, or mission statement.
By establishing a new SG on the subject of resilience analysis, we acknowledge the importance of this area for the further development of risk analysis. There are many issues in the borderline between resilience and risk that need our attention as the call for a shift from risk to resilience points to. Further, the creation of this SG will provide an intellectual and social setting by which they may discuss advancements in resilience analysis – something that will allow SRA to strengthen its membership by appealing to a growing body of experts on resilience analysis in various disciplines and sectors.
The new SG is based on the conviction that resilience analysis is supplementing risk analysis. The focus on resilience represents an opportunity for advancing risk analysis and embracing a new group of professionals working on safety and risk related topics. By establishing the new SG, we seek to obtain new growth for SRA, scientifically and enlarging our community.
The objectives of the Reslience Analysis Specialty Group are to:
- facilitate the exchange of ideas and knowledge among practitioners, researchers, scholars, teachers, and others interested in applications of resilience analysis methods and tools in a decision management context;
- encourage collaborative research on applied resilience analysis and risk assessment; and
- provide leadership and play an active role in advancing issues related to the use of resilience tools in various domains.