Search results for: organisational resilience

Authors: Bilge Ozel

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Cities are high-complex living organisms and are subjects to continuous transformations produced by the stress that derives from changing conditions. Today the metropolises are seen like “development engines” of the countries and accordingly they become the centre of better living conditions that encourages demographic growth which constitutes the main reason of the changes. Indeed, the potential for economic advancement of the cities directly represents the economic status of their countries. The term of “resilience”, which sees the changes as natural processes and represents the flexibility and adaptability of the systems in the face of changing conditions, becomes a key concept for the development of urban transformation policies. The term of “resilience” derives from the Latin word ‘resilire’, which means ‘bounce’, ‘jump back’, refers to the ability of a system to withstand shocks and still maintain the basic characteristics. A resilient system does not only survive the potential risks and threats but also takes advantage of the positive outcomes of the perturbations and ensures adaptation to the new external conditions. When this understanding is taken into the urban context - or rather “urban resilience” - it delineates the capacity of cities to anticipate upcoming shocks and changes without undergoing major alterations in its functional, physical, socio-economic systems. Undoubtedly, the issue of coordinating the urban systems in a “resilient” form is a multidisciplinary and complex process as the cities are multi-layered and dynamic structures. The concept of “urban transformation” is first launched in Europe just after World War II. It has been applied through different methods such as renovation, revitalization, improvement and gentrification. These methods have been in continuous advancement by acquiring new meanings and trends over years. With the effects of neoliberal policies in the 1980s, the concept of urban transformation has been associated with economic objectives. Subsequently this understanding has been improved over time and had new orientations such as providing more social justice and environmental sustainability. The aim of this research is to identify the most applied urban transformation methods in Turkey and its main reasons of being selected. Moreover, investigating the lacking and limiting points of the urban transformation policies in the context of “urban resilience” in a comparative way with European interventions. The emblematic examples, which symbolize the breaking points of the recent evolution of urban transformation concepts in Europe and Turkey, are chosen and reviewed in a critical way.

Keywords: resilience, urban dynamics, urban resilience, urban transformation

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Authors: Samaneh Abedini, Diana Coholic

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The transition from adolescence into adulthood involves many changes that result in increased vulnerability to psychological challenges. This developmental stage can be especially stressful for female youth living in underserviced regions. If mental health problems are left untreated in socially marginalized youth, these challenges can extend into adulthood. We know that a lack of access to mental health services and supports can influence adolescents’ psycho-social development and well-being, while resilience and emotion regulation can help them cope with these challenges. Feasible therapeutic programs can play a significant role in assisting youth in developing these characteristics and skills. Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Children (MBCT-C) and Holistic Art-Based Program (HAP) are two examples of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) that address emotion regulation, coping strategies, and resilience in marginalized youth. While each program’s beneficial effects have been documented, there is a lack of research comparing MBIs with youth, within underserviced geographical locations, and across different cultures. In this study, the sample was 42 female youth between the ages of 12 and 17 years from Iran. 42 female youth from the Elm o Honar High School, located in rural parts of Iran, Isfahan province, have been enrolled in the study. The participants were assigned to one of the MBIs (three MBCT-C experimental groups (n=20) and three HAP experimental groups (n=22)). All participants completed measures including the Child and Youth Resilience Measure-28 (CYRM-28), Child and Adolescent Mindfulness Measure (CAMM), and Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) at baseline and post-intervention. At the end of intervention, the MBCT-C and HAP experimental groups showed significant changes in resilience and emotion regulation. However, the changes in resilience in HAP groups were not significant; the participants in MBCT-C experimental groups showed significant improvement in resilience. The study provided initial evidence that mindfulness-based intervention can be potentially beneficial for improving mental health status in marginalized Iranian female youth living in the middle east culture.

Keywords: benefits, female, marginalized, mindfulness, youth

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Authors: Mary-Ellen Hooper, Graeme Browne, Anthony Paul O'Brien

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Background: It has been reported that the experience of the organisational workplace culture for new graduate mental health nurses plays an important role in their attraction and retention to the discipline. Additionally, other research indicates that a negative workplace culture contributes to their dissatisfaction and attrition rate. Method: An ethnographic research design was applied to explore the subcultural experiences of new graduate nurses as they encounter mental health nursing. Data was collected between April and September 2017 across 6 separate Australian, NSW, mental health units. Data comprised of semi-structured interviews (n=24) and 31 episodes of field observation (62 hours). A total number of 26 new graduate and recent graduate nurses participated in the study – 14 new graduate nurses and 12 recently graduated nurses. Results: A key finding from this study was the New Graduate difficulty in articulating the role the of mental health nurse. Participants described a dichotomy between their ideological view of the mental health nurse and the reality of clinical practice. The participants’ ideological view of the mental health nurse involved providing holistic and individualised care within a flexible framework. Participants, however, described feeling powerless to change the recovery practices within the mental health service(s) because of their low status within the hierarchy. Resulting in participants choosing to fit into the existing culture, or considering leaving the field altogether. Conclusion: An incongruence between the values and ideals of an organisational culture and the reality shock of practice are shown to contribute to role ambiguity within its members. New graduate nurses entering the culture of mental health nursing describe role ambiguity resulting in dissatisfaction with practice. The culture and philosophy inherent to a service are posited to be crucial in creating positive experiences for graduate nurses.

Keywords: culture, mental health nurse, mental health nursing role, new graduate nurse

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Authors: Zhenyu Zhang, Hsi-Hsien Wei

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Highway networks play a vital role in post-disaster recovery for disaster-damaged areas. Damaged bridges in such networks can disrupt the recovery activities by impeding the transportation of people, cargo, and reconstruction resources. Therefore, rapid restoration of damaged bridges is of paramount importance to long-term disaster recovery. In the post-disaster recovery phase, the key to restoration scheduling for a highway network is prioritization of bridge-repair tasks. Resilience is widely used as a measure of the ability to recover with which a network can return to its pre-disaster level of functionality. In practice, highways will be temporarily blocked during the downtime of bridge restoration, leading to the decrease of highway-network functionality. The failure to take downtime effects into account can lead to overestimation of network resilience. Additionally, post-disaster recovery of highway networks is generally divided into emergency bridge repair (EBR) in the response phase and long-term bridge repair (LBR) in the recovery phase, and both of EBR and LBR are different in terms of restoration objectives, restoration duration, budget, etc. Distinguish these two phases are important to precisely quantify highway network resilience and generate suitable restoration schedules for highway networks in the recovery phase. To address the above issues, this study proposes a novel resilience quantification method for the optimization of long-term bridge repair schedules (LBRS) taking into account the impact of EBR activities and restoration downtime on a highway network’s functionality. A time-dependent integer program with recursive functions is formulated for optimally scheduling LBR activities. Moreover, since uncertainty always exists in the LBRS problem, this paper extends the optimization model from the deterministic case to the stochastic case. A hybrid genetic algorithm that integrates a heuristic approach into a traditional genetic algorithm to accelerate the evolution process is developed. The proposed methods are tested using data from the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, based on a regional highway network in Sichuan, China, consisting of 168 highway bridges on 36 highways connecting 25 cities/towns. The results show that, in this case, neglecting the bridge restoration downtime can lead to approximately 15% overestimation of highway network resilience. Moreover, accounting for the impact of EBR on network functionality can help to generate a more specific and reasonable LBRS. The theoretical and practical values are as follows. First, the proposed network recovery curve contributes to comprehensive quantification of highway network resilience by accounting for the impact of both restoration downtime and EBR activities on the recovery curves. Moreover, this study can improve the highway network resilience from the organizational dimension by providing bridge managers with optimal LBR strategies.

Keywords: disaster management, highway network, long-term bridge repair schedule, resilience, restoration downtime

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Authors: Antonis Skouloudis, Georgios Deligiannakis, Panagiotis Vouros, Konstantinos Evangelinos, Loannis Nikolaou

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On November 15th, 2017, a catastrophic flash flood devastated the city of Mandra in Central Greece, resulting in 24 fatalities and extensive damages to the built environment and infrastructure. It was Greece's deadliest and most destructive flood event for the past 40 years. In this paper, we examine the consequences of this event too small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating in Mandra during the flood event, which were affected by the floodwaters to varying extents. In this context, we conducted semi-structured interviews with business owners-managers of 45 SMEs located in flood inundated areas and are still active nowadays, based on an interview guide that spanned 27 topics. The topics pertained to the disaster experience of the business and business owners-managers, knowledge and attitudes towards climate change and extreme weather, aspects of disaster preparedness and related assistance needs. Our findings reveal that the vast majority of the affected businesses experienced heavy damages in equipment and infrastructure or total destruction, which resulted in business interruption from several weeks up to several months. Assistance from relatives or friends helped for the damage repairs and business recovery, while state compensations were deemed insufficient compared to the extent of the damages. Most interviewees pinpoint flooding as one of the most critical risks, and many connect it with the climate crisis. However, they are either not willing or unable to apply property-level prevention measures in their businesses due to cost considerations or complex and cumbersome bureaucratic processes. In all cases, the business owners are fully aware of the flood hazard implications, and since the recovery from the event, they have engaged in basic mitigation measures and contingency plans in case of future flood events. Such plans include insurance contracts whenever possible (as the vast majority of the affected SMEs were uninsured at the time of the 2017 event) as well as simple relocations of critical equipment within their property. The study offers fruitful insights on latent drivers and barriers of SMEs' resilience capacity to flash flooding. In this respect, findings such as ours, highlighting tensions that underpin behavioral responses and experiences, can feed into a) bottom-up approaches for devising actionable and practical guidelines, manuals and/or standards on business preparedness to flooding, and, ultimately, b) policy-making for an enabling environment towards a flood-resilient SME sector.

Keywords: flash flood, small and medium-sized enterprises, organizational resilience capacity, disaster preparedness, qualitative study

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Authors: Shelley Harrington

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As a result of increasingly dynamic business environments, the creation and fostering of dynamic capabilities, [those capabilities that enable sustained competitive success despite of dynamism through the awareness and reconfiguration of internal and external competencies], supported by organisational learning [a dynamic capability] has gained increased and prevalent momentum in the research arena. Presenting findings funded by the Economic Social Research Council, this paper investigates the extent to which Senior Management Team (SMT) personality (at the trait and facet level) is associated with the creation of dynamic managerial capabilities at the team level, and effective organisational learning/knowledge sharing within the firm. In doing so, this research highlights the importance of micro-foundations in organisational psychology and specifically dynamic capabilities, a field which to date has largely ignored the importance of psychology in understanding these important and necessary capabilities. Using a direct measure of personality (NEO PI-3) at the trait and facet level across 32 high technology and finance firms in the UK, their CEOs (N=32) and their complete SMTs [N=212], a new measure of dynamic managerial capabilities at the team level was created and statistically validated for use within the work. A quantitative methodology was employed with regression and gap analysis being used to show the empirical foundations of personality being positioned as a micro-foundation of dynamic capabilities. The results of this study found that personality homogeneity within the SMT was required to strengthen the dynamic managerial capabilities of sensing, seizing and transforming, something which was required to reflect strong organisational learning at middle management level [N=533]. In particular, it was found that the greater the difference [t-score gaps] between the personality profiles of a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and their complete, collective SMT, the lower the resulting self-reported nature of dynamic managerial capabilities. For example; the larger the difference between a CEOs level of dutifulness, a facet contributing to the definition of conscientiousness, and their SMT’s level of dutifulness, the lower the reported level of transforming, a capability fundamental to strategic change in a dynamic business environment. This in turn directly questions recent trends, particularly in upper echelons research highlighting the need for heterogeneity within teams. In doing so, it successfully positions personality as a micro-foundation of dynamic capabilities, thus contributing to recent discussions from within the strategic management field calling for the need to empirically explore dynamic capabilities at such a level.

Keywords: dynamic managerial capabilities, senior management teams, personality, dynamism

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Authors: Vincenzo Russo, Rosella Giacometti

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The paper aims to assess the insurance industry's resilience under Solvency II against adverse scenarios. Starting from the economic balance sheet available under Solvency II for insurance and reinsurance undertakings, we assume that assets and liabilities follow a bivariate geometric Brownian motion (GBM). Then, using the results available under Margrabe's formula, we establish an analytical solution to calibrate the volatility of the asset-liability ratio. In such a way, we can estimate the probability of default and the probability of breaching the undertaking's Solvency Capital Requirement (SCR). Furthermore, since estimating the volatility of the Solvency Ratio became crucial for insurers in light of the financial crises featured in the last decades, we introduce a novel measure that we call Resiliency Ratio. The Resiliency Ratio can be used, in addition to the Solvency Ratio, to evaluate the insurance industry's resilience in case of adverse scenarios. Finally, we introduce a simplified stress test tool to evaluate the economic balance sheet under stressed conditions. The model we propose is featured by analytical tractability and fast calibration procedure where only the disclosed data available under the Solvency II public reporting are needed for the calibration. Using the data published regularly by the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) in an aggregated form by country, an empirical analysis has been performed to calibrate the model and provide the related results at the country level.

Keywords: Solvency II, solvency ratio, volatility of the asset-liability ratio, probability of default, probability to breach the SCR, resilience ratio, stress test

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Authors: Behrooz Balaei, Suzanne Wilkinson, Regan Potangaroa, Larry Abel, Philip McFarlane

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Water supply system failure has serious direct and indirect effects on people wellbeing. Post-disaster water system serviceability depends on a variety of factors from technical characteristics to social, economic, and organizational attributes of communities. This paper tests the organizational factors affecting water supply resilience to outline how these factors contributed to previous disasters. To do so, a framework is briefly introduced in this study to provide a clear guide to identify the significant relevant organizational factors. Then the factors affecting water serviceability following a disaster are outlines. Next, these factors are measured in the case of Tropical Cyclone Pam, which hit Vanuatu in March 2015. Reviewing the existing literature has also been carried out to obtain a comprehensive understanding of the background A site visit and a series of interviews have also been undertaken following the cyclone to collect site-specific data and information. In the end, the organizational factors were ranked to enable decision makers to identify significance of each factor compared to the others.

Keywords: water supply, resilience, organizational capacity, Vanuatu, Tropical Cyclone Pam

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Authors: Caroline McDonald-Harker, Julie Drolet

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Abstract— In the last six years Canada In the last six years Canada has experienced two major and catastrophic environmental disasters– the 2013 Southern Alberta flood and the 2016 Fort McMurray, Alberta wildfire. These two disasters resulted in damages exceeding 12 billion dollars, the costliest disasters in Canadian history. In the aftermath of these disasters, many families faced the loss of homes, places of employment, schools, recreational facilities, and also experienced social, emotional, and psychological difficulties. Children and youth are among the most vulnerable to the devastating effects of disasters due to the physical, cognitive, and social factors related to their developmental life stage. Yet children and youth also have the capacity to be resilient and act as powerful catalyst for change in their own lives and wider communities following disaster. Little is known, particularly from a sociological perspective, about the specific factors that contribute to resilience in children and youth, and effective ways to support their overall health and well-being. This paper focuses on the voices and experiences of children and youth residing in these two disaster-affected communities in Alberta, Canada and specifically examines: 1) How children and youth’s lives are impacted by the tragedy, devastation, and upheaval of disaster; 2) Ways that children and youth demonstrate resilience when directly faced with the adversarial circumstances of disaster; and 3) The cumulative internal and external factors that contribute to bolstering and supporting resilience among children and youth post-disaster. This paper discusses the characteristics associated with high levels of resilience in 183 children and youth ages 5 to 17 based on quantitative and qualitative data obtained through a mix methods approach. Child and youth participants were administered the Children and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM-28) in order to examine factors that influence resilience processes including: individual, caregiver, and context factors. The CYRM-28 was then supplemented with qualitative interviews with children and youth to contextualize the CYRM-28 resiliency factors and provide further insight into their overall disaster experience. Findings reveal that high levels of resilience among child and youth participants is associated with both individual factors and caregiver factors, specifically positive outlook, effective communication, peer support, and physical and psychological caregiving. Individual and caregiver factors helped mitigate the negative effects of disaster, thus bolstering resilience in children and youth. This paper discusses the implications that these findings have for understanding the specific mechanisms that support the resiliency processes and overall recovery of children and youth following disaster; the importance of bridging the gap between children and youth’s needs and the services and supports provided to them post-disaster; and the need to develop resiliency processes and practices that empower children and youth as active agents of change in their own lives following disaster. These findings contribute to furthering knowledge about pragmatic and representative changes to resources, programs, and policies surrounding disaster response, recovery, and mitigation.

Keywords: children and youth, disaster, environment, resilience

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Authors: William Ho, Agus Wicaksana

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Anecdotal evidence in the last decade shows that the occurrence of disruptive events and uncertainties in the supply chain is increasing. The coupling of these events with the nature of an increasingly complex and interdependent business environment leads to devastating impacts that quickly propagate within and across organizations. For example, the recent COVID-19 pandemic increased the global supply chain disruption frequency by at least 20% in 2020 and is projected to have an accumulative cost of $13.8 trillion by 2024. This crisis raises attention to organizational resilience to weather business uncertainty. However, the concept has been criticized for being vague and lacking a consistent definition, thus reducing the significance of the concept for practice and research. This study is intended to solve that issue by providing a comprehensive review of the conceptualization, measurement, and antecedents of operational resilience that have been discussed in the supply chain risk management literature (SCRM). We performed a Scholarly Network Analysis, combining citation-based and text-based approaches, on 252 articles published from 2000 to 2021 in top-tier journals based on three parameters: AJG ranking and ABS ranking, UT Dallas and FT50 list, and editorial board review. We utilized a hybrid scholarly network analysis by combining citation-based and text-based approaches to understand the conceptualization, measurement, and antecedents of operational resilience in the SCRM literature. Specifically, we employed a Bibliographic Coupling Analysis in the research cluster formation stage and a Co-words Analysis in the research cluster interpretation and analysis stage. Our analysis reveals three major research clusters of resilience research in the SCRM literature, namely (1) supply chain network design and optimization, (2) organizational capabilities, and (3) digital technologies. We portray the research process in the last two decades in terms of the exemplar studies, problems studied, commonly used approaches and theories, and solutions provided in each cluster. We then provide a conceptual framework on the conceptualization and antecedents of resilience based on studies in these clusters and highlight potential areas that need to be studied further. Finally, we leverage the concept of abnormal operating performance to propose a new measurement strategy for resilience. This measurement overcomes the limitation of most current measurements that are event-dependent and focus on the resistance or recovery stage - without capturing the growth stage. In conclusion, this study provides a robust literature review through a scholarly network analysis that increases the completeness and accuracy of research cluster identification and analysis to understand conceptualization, antecedents, and measurement of resilience. It also enables us to perform a comprehensive review of resilience research in SCRM literature by including research articles published during the pandemic and connects this development with a plethora of articles published in the last two decades. From the managerial perspective, this study provides practitioners with clarity on the conceptualization and critical success factors of firm resilience from the SCRM perspective.

Keywords: supply chain risk management, organizational resilience, scholarly network analysis, systematic literature review

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Authors: Mohamed Haffar, Lois Farquharson, Gbola Gbadamosi, Wafi Al-Karaghouli, Ramadane Djbarni

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A few recent research studies and mostly conceptual in nature have paid attention to the relationship between organizational culture (OC), individual readiness for change (IRFC) and individual affective commitment to change (IACC). Surprisingly enough, there is a lack of empirical studies investigating the influence of all four OC types on IRFC and IACC. Moreover, there is a very limited research investigating the mediating role of individual readiness for change between OC types and individual affective commitment to change. Therefore, this study is proposed to fill this gap by providing empirical evidence leading to advancement in the understanding of direct and indirect influences of OC on individual affective commitment to change. To achieve this, a questionnaire based survey was developed and self-administered to 226 middle managers in Algerian manufacturing organizations (AMOs). The results of this study indicated that group culture and adhocracy culture positively affect the IACC. Furthermore, the findings of this study show support for the mediating roles of self-efficacy and personally valence in the relationship between OC and IACC.

Keywords: individual readiness for change, individual commitment to change, organisational culture, manufacturing organisations

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Authors: Jack L. Harris, Marya L. Doerfel, Hyunsook Youn, Minkyung Kim, Kautuki Sunil Jariwala

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Organizational resilience refers to the ability to sustain business or general work functioning despite wide-scale interruptions. We focus on organization and businesses as a pillar of their communities and how they attempt to sustain work when a natural disaster impacts their surrounding regions and economies. While it may be more common to think of resilience as a trait possessed by an organization, an emerging area of research recognizes that for organizations and businesses, resilience is a set of processes that are constituted through communication, social networks, and organizing. Indeed, five processes, robustness, rapidity, resourcefulness, redundancy, and external availability through social media have been identified as critical to organizational resilience. These organizing mechanisms involve multi-level coordination, where individuals intersect with groups, organizations, and communities. Because the nature of such interactions are often networks of people and organizations coordinating material resources, information, and support, they necessarily require some way to coordinate despite being displaced. Little is known, however, if physical and digital spaces can substitute one for the other. We thus are guided by the question, is digital space sufficient when disaster creates a scarcity of physical space? This study presents a cross-case comparison based on field research from four different regions of the United States that were impacted by Hurricanes Katrina (2005), Sandy (2012), Maria (2017), and Harvey (2017). These four cases are used to extend the science of resilience by examining multi-level processes enacted by individuals, communities, and organizations that together, contribute to the resilience of disaster-struck organizations, businesses, and their communities. Using field research about organizations and businesses impacted by the four hurricanes, we code data from interviews, participant observations, field notes, and document analysis drawn from New Orleans (post-Katrina), coastal New Jersey (post-Sandy), Houston Texas (post-Harvey), and the lower keys of Florida (post-Maria). This paper identifies an additional organizing mechanism, networked gathering spaces, where citizens and organizations, alike, coordinate and facilitate information sharing, material resource distribution, and social support. Findings show that digital space, alone, is not a sufficient substitute to effectively sustain organizational resilience during a disaster. Because the data are qualitative, we expand on this finding with specific ways in which organizations and the people who lead them worked around the problem of scarce space. We propose that gatherings after disaster are a sixth mechanism that contributes to organizational resilience.

Keywords: communication, coordination, disaster management, information and communication technologies, interorganizational relationships, resilience, work

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Authors: S. H. Iranmanesh, L. Aliabadi, A. Mollajan

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Integrated resilience engineering (IRE) is capable of returning banking systems to the normal state in extensive economic circumstances. In this study, information system of a large bank (with several branches) is assessed and optimized under severe economic conditions. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) models are employed to achieve the objective of this study. Nine IRE factors are considered to be the outputs, and a dummy variable is defined as the input of the DEA models. A standard questionnaire is designed and distributed among executive managers to be considered as the decision-making units (DMUs). Reliability and validity of the questionnaire is examined based on Cronbach's alpha and t-test. The most appropriate DEA model is determined based on average efficiency and normality test. It is shown that the proposed integrated design provides higher efficiency than the conventional RE design. Results of sensitivity and perturbation analysis indicate that self-organization, fault tolerance, and reporting culture respectively compose about 50 percent of total weight.

Keywords: banking system, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), Integrated Resilience Engineering (IRE), performance evaluation, perturbation analysis

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Authors: Farzaneh Sasanpour, Saeed Amini Varaki

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Resilience is an important goal for cities as urban areas face an increasing range of challenges in the 21st century; therefore, according to the characteristics of risks, adopting an approach that responds to sensitive conditions in the risk management process is the resilience of cities. In the meantime, most of the resilience assessments have dealt with natural hazards and less attention has been paid to pandemics.In the covid-19 pandemic, the country of Iran and especially the metropolis of Tehran, was not immune from the crisis caused by its effects and consequences and faced many challenges. One of the methods that can increase the resilience of Tehran's metropolis against possible crises in the future is future studies. This research is practical in terms of type. The general pattern of the research will be descriptive-analytical and from the point of view that it is trying to communicate between the components and provide urban resilience indicators with pandemic crises and explain the scenarios, its future studies method is exploratory. In order to extract and determine the key factors and driving forces effective on the resilience of Tehran's urban areas against pandemic crises (Covid-19), the method of structural analysis of mutual effects and Micmac software was used. Therefore, the primary factors and variables affecting the resilience of Tehran's urban areas were set in 5 main factors, including physical-infrastructural (transportation, spatial and physical organization, streets and roads, multi-purpose development) with 39 variables based on mutual effects analysis. Finally, key factors and variables in five main areas, including managerial-institutional with five variables; Technology (intelligence) with 3 variables; economic with 2 variables; socio-cultural with 3 variables; and physical infrastructure, were categorized with 7 variables. These factors and variables have been used as key factors and effective driving forces on the resilience of Tehran's urban areas against pandemic crises (Covid-19), in explaining and developing scenarios. In order to develop the scenarios for the resilience of Tehran's urban areas against pandemic crises (Covid-19), intuitive logic, scenario planning as one of the future research methods and the Global Business Network (GBN) model were used. Finally, four scenarios have been drawn and selected with a creative method using the metaphor of weather conditions, which is indicative of the general outline of the conditions of the metropolis of Tehran in that situation. Therefore, the scenarios of Tehran metropolis were obtained in the form of four scenarios: 1- solar scenario (optimal governance and management leading in smart technology) 2- cloud scenario (optimal governance and management following in intelligent technology) 3- dark scenario (optimal governance and management Unfavorable leader in intelligence technology) 4- Storm scenario (unfavorable governance and management of follower in intelligence technology). The solar scenario shows the best situation and the stormy scenario shows the worst situation for the Tehran metropolis. According to the findings obtained in this research, city managers can, in order to achieve a better tomorrow for the metropolis of Tehran, in all the factors and components of urban resilience against pandemic crises by using future research methods, a coherent picture with the long-term horizon of 2050, from the path Provide urban resilience movement and platforms for upgrading and increasing the capacity to deal with the crisis. To create the necessary platforms for the realization, development and evolution of the urban areas of Tehran in a way that guarantees long-term balance and stability in all dimensions and levels.

Keywords: future research, resilience, crisis, pandemic, covid-19, Tehran

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Authors: Muneeb Banday, Anukriti Dixit

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Change in organizations is viewed as a conversion process of the organizational functioning. One of the crucial elements of this conversion process is the employee resistance to organizational change. The existing literature on change resistance has generally treated resistance as a barrier or an opportunity for successful implementation of change. However, there is little empirical research exploring how resistance to change is managed. This may be partially due to difficulty in getting information on resistance to change. The top management does not divulge such information to avoid negative evaluation whereas employees face huge risk in sharing information related to resistance. The focus of the study is to understand how the organization under study dealt with the employee resistance to change. The conversion process is a story of how the organization went from one stage to another. We used narrative approach to change. Data was collected data through company visits and interviews. The interviews were transcribed, coded, and themes were identified. We focused on the strands that left huge scope for alternative interpretations than the dominant narrative of change prevalent in the organization. The study reveals that the top management strategically uses the legitimacy of leadership, roles of key employees, and rationality of change to manage resistance.

Keywords: employee resistance, legitimacy of leadership, narrative analysis, organisational change

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Authors: M. De Iuliis, O. Kammouh, G. P. Cimellaro, S. Tesfamariam

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Community Resilience has gained a significant attention due to the recent unexpected natural and man-made disasters. Resilience is the process of maintaining livable conditions in the event of interruptions in normally available services. Estimating the resilience of systems, ranging from individuals to communities, is a formidable task due to the complexity involved in the process. The most challenging parameter involved in the resilience assessment is the 'downtime'. Downtime is the time needed for a system to recover its services following a disaster event. Estimating the exact downtime of a system requires a lot of inputs and resources that are not always obtainable. The uncertainties in the downtime estimation are usually handled using probabilistic methods, which necessitates acquiring large historical data. The estimation process also involves ignorance, imprecision, vagueness, and subjective judgment. In this paper, a fuzzy-based approach to estimate the downtime of building structures following earthquake events is proposed. Fuzzy logic can integrate descriptive (linguistic) knowledge and numerical data into the fuzzy system. This ability allows the use of walk down surveys, which collect data in a linguistic or a numerical form. The use of fuzzy logic permits a fast and economical estimation of parameters that involve uncertainties. The first step of the method is to determine the building’s vulnerability. A rapid visual screening is designed to acquire information about the analyzed building (e.g. year of construction, structural system, site seismicity, etc.). Then, a fuzzy logic is implemented using a hierarchical scheme to determine the building damageability, which is the main ingredient to estimate the downtime. Generally, the downtime can be divided into three main components: downtime due to the actual damage (DT1); downtime caused by rational and irrational delays (DT2); and downtime due to utilities disruption (DT3). In this work, DT1 is computed by relating the building damageability results obtained from the visual screening to some already-defined components repair times available in the literature. DT2 and DT3 are estimated using the REDITM Guidelines. The Downtime of the building is finally obtained by combining the three components. The proposed method also allows identifying the downtime corresponding to each of the three recovery states: re-occupancy; functional recovery; and full recovery. Future work is aimed at improving the current methodology to pass from the downtime to the resilience of buildings. This will provide a simple tool that can be used by the authorities for decision making.

Keywords: resilience, restoration, downtime, community resilience, fuzzy logic, recovery, damage, built environment

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Authors: C. Li, G. Coates, N. Johnson, M. Mc Guinness

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In the UK, flooding is responsible for significant losses to the economy due to the impact on businesses, the vast majority of which are Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Businesses of this nature tend to lack formal plans to aid their response to and recovery from disruptive events such as flooding. This paper reports on work on how an agent-based model (ABM) is being developed based on interview data gathered from SMEs at-risk of flooding and/or have direct experience of flooding. The ABM will enable simulations to be performed allowing investigations of different response strategies which SMEs may employ to lessen the impact of flooding, thus strengthening their resilience.

Keywords: ABM, flood response, SMEs, business continuity

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Authors: Nada Mohamed, Abdel Aziz Mohamed

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Climate change in coastal areas is a global issue that can be felt on local scale and will be around for decades and centuries to come to an end; it also has critical risks on the city’s economy, communities, and the natural environment. One of these changes that cause a huge risk on coastal cities is the sea level rise (SLR). SLR is a result of scarcity and reduction in global environmental system. The main cause of climate change and global warming is the countries with high development index (HDI) as Japan and Germany while the medium and low HDI countries as Egypt does not have enough awareness and advanced tactics to adapt with this changes that destroy urban areas and cause loss in land and economy. This is why Climate Resilience is one of the UN sustainable development goals 2030, which is calling for actions to strengthen climate change resilience through mitigation and adaptation. For many reasons, adaptation has received less attention than mitigation and it is only recently that adaptation has become a focal global point of attention. This adaption can be achieved through some actions such as upgrading the use and the design of the land, adjusting business and activities of people, and increasing community understanding of climate risks. To reach the adaption goals, and we have to apply a strategic pathway to Climate Resilience, which is the Urban Bioregionalism Paradigm. Resiliency has been framed as persistence, adaptation, and transformation. Climate Resilience decision support system includes a visualization platform where ecological, social, and economic information can be viewed alongside with specific geographies that's why Urban Bioregionalism is a socio-ecological system which is defined as a paradigm that has potential to help move social attitudes toward environmental understanding and deepen human-environment connections within ecological development. The research aim is to achieve an adaptive integrated urban development model throughout the analyses of tactics and strategies that can be used to adapt urban areas and coastal communities to the challenges of climate changes especially SLR and also simulation model using advanced technological software for a coastal city corridor to elaborates the suitable strategy to apply.

Keywords: climate resilience, sea level rise, SLR, coastal resilience, adaptive development simulation

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Authors: Beatriz Martinez-Pastor, Maria Nogal, Alan O'Connor

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During the last years, the number of extreme weather events has increased. A variety of extreme weather events, including river floods, rain-induced landslides, droughts, winter storms, wildfire, and hurricanes, have threatened and damaged many different regions worldwide. These events have a devastating impact on critical infrastructure systems resulting in high social, economical and environmental costs. These events have a huge impact in transport systems. Since, transport networks are completely exposed to every kind of climatological perturbations, and its performance is closely related with these events. When a traffic network is affected by a climatological hazard, the quality of its service is threatened, and the level of the traffic conditions usually decreases. With the aim of understanding this process, the concept of resilience has become most popular in the area of transport. Transport resilience analyses the behavior of a traffic network when a perturbation takes place. This holistic concept studies the complete process, from the beginning of the perturbation until the total recovery of the system, when the perturbation has finished. Many concepts are included in the definition of resilience, such as vulnerability, redundancy, adaptability, and safety. Once the resilience of a transport network can be evaluated, in this case, the methodology used is a dynamic equilibrium-restricted assignment model that allows the quantification of the concept, the next step is its improvement. Through the improvement of this concept, it will be possible to create transport networks that are able to withstand and have a better performance under the presence of climatological hazards. Analyzing the impact of a perturbation in a traffic network, it is observed that the response of the different links, which are part of the network, can be completely different from one to another. Consequently and due to this effect, many questions arise, as what makes a link more critical before an extreme weather event? or how is it possible to identify these critical links? With this aim, and knowing that most of the times the owners or managers of the transport systems have limited resources, the identification of the critical links of a transport network before extreme weather events, becomes a crucial objective. For that reason, using the available resources in the areas that will generate a higher improvement of the resilience, will contribute to the global development of the network. Therefore, this paper wants to analyze what kind of characteristic makes a link a critical one when an extreme weather event damages a transport network and finally identify them.

Keywords: critical links, extreme weather events, hazard, resilience, transport network

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Authors: Caroline Spencer, Suzanne Cross, Dudley McArdle, Frank Archer

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Objectives: The evolution of the Victorian Compendium of Community-Based Resilience Building Case Studies and its capacity to help communities implement activities that encourage adaptation to disaster risk reduction and promote community resilience in rural and urban locations provide this paper's objectives. Background: Between 2012 and 2019, community groups presented at the Monash University Disaster Resilience Initiative (MUDRI) 'Advancing Community Resilience Annual Forums', provided opportunities for communities to impart local resilience activities, how to solve challenges and share unforeseen learning and be considered for inclusion in the Compendium. A key tenet of the Compendium encourages compiling and sharing of grass-roots resilience building activities to help communities before, during, and after unexpected emergencies. The online Compendium provides free access for anyone wanting to help communities build expertise, reduce program duplication, and save valuable community resources. Identifying case study features across the emergency phases and analyzing critical success factors helps communities understand what worked and what did not work to achieve success and avoid known barriers. International exemplars inform the Compendium, which represents an Australian first and enhances Victorian community resilience initiatives. Emergency Management Victoria provided seed funding for the Compendium. MUDRI matched this support and continues to fund the project. A joint Steering Committee with broad-based user input and Human ethics approval guides its continued growth. Methods: A thematic analysis of the Compendium identified case study features, including critical success factors. Results: The Compendium comprises 38 case studies, representing all eight Victorian regions. Case studies addressed emergency phases, before (29), during (7), and after (17) events. Case studies addressed all hazards (23), bushfires (11), heat (2), fire safety (1), and house fires (1). Twenty case studies used a framework. Thirty received funding, of which nine received less than $20,000 and five received more than $100,000. Twenty-nine addressed a whole of community perspective. Case studies revealed unique and valuable learning in diverse settings. Critical success factors included strong governance; board support, leadership, and trust; partnerships; commitment, adaptability, and stamina; community-led initiatives. Other success factors included a paid facilitator and local government support; external funding, and celebrating success. Anecdotally, we are aware that community groups reference Compendium and that its value adds to community resilience planning. Discussion: The Compendium offers an innovative contribution to resilience research and practice. It augments the seven resilience characteristics to strengthen and encourage communities as outlined in the Statewide Community Resilience Framework for Emergency Management; brings together people from across sectors to deliver distinct, yet connected actions to strengthen resilience as a part of the Rockefeller funded Resilient Melbourne Strategy, and supports communities and economies to be resilient when a shock occurs as identified in the recently published Australian National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework. Each case study offers learning about connecting with community and how to increase their resilience to disaster risks and to keep their community safe from unexpected emergencies. Conclusion: The Compendium enables diverse communities to adopt or adapt proven resilience activities, thereby preserving valuable community resources and offers the opportunity to extend to a national or international Compendium.

Keywords: case study, community, compendium, disaster risk reduction, resilience

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Authors: Claude Nsobya, Alice Moncaster, Karen Potter, Jed Ramsay

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The shift in Flood Risk Governance (FRG) has moved away from traditional approaches that solely relied on centralized decision-making and structural flood defenses. Instead, there is now the adoption of integrated flood risk management measures that involve various actors and stakeholders. This new approach emphasizes people-centered approaches, including adaptation and learning. This shift to a diversity of FRG approaches has been identified as a significant factor in enhancing resilience. Resilience here refers to a community's ability to withstand, absorb, recover, adapt, and potentially transform in the face of flood events. It is argued that if the FRG merely focused on the conventional 'fighting the water' - flood defense - communities would not be resilient. The move to these people-centered approaches also implies that communities will be more involved in FRG. It is suggested that effective flood risk governance influences resilience through meaningful community involvement, and effective community engagement is vital in shaping community resilience to floods. Successful community participation not only uses context-specific indigenous knowledge but also develops a sense of ownership and responsibility. Through capacity development initiatives, it can also raise awareness and all these help in building resilience. Recent Flood Risk Management (FRM) projects have thus had increasing community involvement, with varied conceptualizations of such community engagement in the academic literature on FRM. In the context of overland floods, there has been a substantial body of literature on Flood Risk Governance and Management. Yet, groundwater flooding has gotten little attention despite its unique qualities, such as its persistence for weeks or months, slow onset, and near-invisibility. There has been a little study in this area on how successful community involvement in Flood Risk Governance may improve community resilience to groundwater flooding in particular. This paper focuses on a case study of a flood risk management project in the United Kingdom. Buckinghamshire Council is leading Project Groundwater, which is one of 25 significant initiatives sponsored by England's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) Flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation Programme. DEFRA awarded Buckinghamshire Council and other councils 150 million to collaborate with communities and implement innovative methods to increase resilience to groundwater flooding. Based on a literature review, this paper proposes a new paradigm for effective community engagement in Flood Risk Governance (FRG). This study contends that effective community participation can have an impact on various resilience capacities identified in the literature, including social capital, institutional capital, physical capital, natural capital, human capital, and economic capital. In the case of social capital, for example, successful community engagement can influence social capital through the process of social learning as well as through developing social networks and trust values, which are vital in influencing communities' capacity to resist, absorb, recover, and adapt. The study examines community engagement in Project Groundwater using surveys with local communities and documentary analysis to test this notion. The outcomes of the study will inform community involvement activities in Project Groundwater and may shape DEFRA policies and guidelines for community engagement in FRM.

Keywords: flood risk governance, community, resilience, groundwater flooding

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Authors: Soheil Roumi, Fan Zhang, Rodney Stewart

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Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) indexes represented the suitability of a place to study, work, and live. Many indexes have been introduced based on the physical measurement or occupant surveys in commercial buildings. The earlier studies did not elaborate on the relationship between energy consumption and IEQ in office buildings. Such a relationship can provide a comprehensive overview of the building's performance. Also, it would find the potential of already constructed buildings under the upcoming climate change. A commercial building in southeast Queensland, Australia, was evaluated in this study. Physical measurements of IEQ and Energy areconducted, and their relationship will be determined using statistical analysis. The case study building is modelled in TRNSys software, and it will be validatedusingthe actual building's BMS data. Then, the modelled buildingwill be simulated by predicted weather data developed by the commonwealth scientific and industrial research organisation of Australia to investigate the occupant resilience and energy consumption. Finally, recommendations will be presented to consume less energy while providinga proper indoor environment for office occupants.

Keywords: IEQ, office buildings, thermal comfort, occupant resilience

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Authors: Alsnosy Balbaa, Mohamed Nabil Elnabawi, Yasmin El Meladi

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With the ever-growing concerns of climate change, Mediterranean ports, as vital economic and transport hubs face unique challenges in maintaining operations and infrastructure. This empirical study seeks to understand the current adaptations and preparedness levels of Egyptian Mediterranean ports against climate-induced disruptions. Drawing from a structured questionnaire, the research gathers insights on observed climate impacts, infrastructure adaptations, operational changes, and stakeholder engagement, aiming to shed light on the resilience of these ports in the face of a changing climate.

Keywords: climate, infrastructures, port, mediterranean

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Authors: F. Ismael Roman Moreno, Francisca Alba Sanchez

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Over time, the plant landscape has changed as a result of the numerous events on a global and local scale that have happened. This is the case of the Mediterranean ecosystems, one of the most complex and rich in endemisms on the planet, subjected to anthropic pressures from the beginning of civilizations. The intervention in these systems together with climate changes has led to changes in diversity, tree cover, shrub, and ultimately in the structure and functioning of these ecosystems. Paleopalinology is used as a tool for analysis of pollen and non-pollen microfossils preserved in the flooded grasslands of the Middle Atlas (Morocco). This allows reconstructing the evolution of vegetation and climate, as well as providing data and reasoning to different ecological, cultural and historical processes. Although climatic and anthropic events are well documented in Europe, they are not so well documented in North Africa, which gives added value to the study area. The results obtained serve to predict the behavior and evolution of Mediterranean mountain ecosystems during the Holocene, their response to future changes, resilience, and recovery from climatic and anthropic disturbances. In the stratigraphic series analyzed, nine major events were detected, eight of which appeared to be of climatic and anthropic origin, and one unexpected, related to volcanic activity.

Keywords: anthropic, Holocene, Morocco, paleopalynology, resilience

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Authors: Joel Thomas, Alexa Squirini

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The key argument of this research is that every element of systems interoperability is an enabler of regional disaster resilience, and arguably should become a focal point for standardized measurement of communities’ ability to work together. Few resilience research efforts have focused on the development and application of solutions that measurably improve communities’ ability to work together at a regional level, yet a majority of the most devastating and disruptive disasters are those that have had a regional impact. The key findings of the research include a unique theoretical, mathematical, and operational approach to tangibly and defensibly measure and assess systems interoperability required to support crisis information management activities performed by governments, the private sector, and humanitarian organizations. A most effective way for communities to measurably improve regional disaster resilience is through deliberately executed disaster preparedness activities. Developing interoperable crisis information management capabilities is a crosscutting preparedness activity that greatly affects a community’s readiness and ability to work together in times of crisis. Thus, improving communities’ human and technical posture to work together in advance of a crisis, with the ultimate goal of enabling information sharing to support coordination and the careful management of available resources, is a primary means by which communities may improve regional disaster resilience. This model describes how systems interoperability can be qualitatively and quantitatively assessed when characterized as five forms of capital: governance; standard operating procedures; technology; training and exercises; and usage. The unique measurement framework presented defines the relationships between systems interoperability, information sharing and safeguarding, operational coordination, community preparedness and regional disaster resilience, and offers a means by which to implement real-world solutions and measure progress over the course of a multi-year program. The model is being developed and piloted in partnership with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Advanced Regional Civil Emergency Coordination Pilot (ARCECP) with twenty-three organizations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. The intended effect of the model implementation is to enable communities to answer two key questions: 'Have we measurably improved crisis information management capabilities as a result of this effort?' and, 'As a result, are we more resilient?'

Keywords: disaster, interoperability, measurement, resilience

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Authors: Marinela Istrate, Ionel Muntele, Alexandru Bănică

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The authors propose the identification, analysis and prognosis of the quantitative and qualitative evolution of the elderly population in the functional urban areas. The present paper takes into account the analysis of some representative indicators (the weight of the elderly population, ageing index, dynamic index of economic ageing of productive population etc.) and the elaboration of an integrated indicator that would help differentiate the population ageing forms in the 48 functional urban areas that were defined based on demographic and social-economic criteria for all large and medium cities in Romania.

Keywords: ageing, demographic transition, functional urban areas, spatial resilience

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Authors: Bishal Baniya

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This paper proposes the sustainability related policy areas for decarbonisation and value addition at an organizational level. General and public sector organizations around the world are usually significant in terms of consuming resources and producing waste – powered through their massive procurement capacity. However, these organizations also possess huge potential to cut resource use and emission as many of these organizations controls supply chain of goods/services. They can therefore be a trend setter and can easily lead other major economic sectors such as manufacturing, construction and mining, transportation, etc. in pursuit towards paradigm shift for sustainability. Whilst the environmental and social awareness has improved in recent years and they have identified policy areas to improve the organizational environmental performance, value addition to the core business of the organization hasn’t been understood and interpreted correctly. This paper therefore investigates ways to align sustainability policy measures in a way that it creates better value proposition relative to benchmark by accounting both eco and social efficiency. Preliminary analysis shows co-benefits other than resource and cost savings fosters the business cases for organizations and this can be achieved by better aligning the policy measures and engaging stakeholders.

Keywords: policy measures, environmental performance, value proposition, organisational level

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Authors: Elena Selezneva

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Over the last two decades, an unprecedented growth in uncertainty and volatility in all aspects of the business environment has caused major global supply chain disruptions and malfunctions. The effects of one failed company in a supply chain can ripple up and down the chain, causing a number of entities or an entire supply chain to collapse. The complicating factor is that an increasingly unstable and unpredictable business environment fuels the growing complexity of global supply chain networks. That makes supply chain operations extremely unpredictable and hard to manage with the established methods and strategies. It has caused the premature demise of many companies around the globe as they could not withstand or adapt to the storm of change. Solutions to this problem are not easy to come by. There is a lack of new empirically tested theories and practically viable supply chain resilience strategies. The mainstream organizational approach to managing supply chain resilience is rooted in well-established theories developed in the 1960-1980s. However, their effectiveness is questionable in currently extremely volatile business environments. The systems thinking approach offers an alternative view of supply chain resilience. Still, it is very much in the development stage. The aim of this explorative research is to investigate supply chain management strategies that are successful in taming complexity in volatile business environments and creating resilience in supply chains. The design of this research methodology was guided by an interpretivist paradigm. A literature review informed the selection of the systems thinking approach to supply chain resilience. Therefore, an explorative single case study of Ventilator Challenge UK was selected as a case study for its extremely resilient performance of its supply chain during a period of national crisis. Ventilator Challenge UK is intensive care ventilators supply project for the NHS. It ran for 3.5 months and finished in 2020. The participants moved on with their lives, and most of them are not employed by the same organizations anymore. Therefore, the study data includes documents, historical interviews, live interviews with participants, and social media postings. The data analysis was accomplished in two stages. First, data were thematically analyzed. In the second stage, pattern matching and pattern identification were used to identify themes that formed the findings of the research. The findings from the Ventilator Challenge UK case study supply management practices demonstrated all the features of an adaptive dynamic system. They cover all the elements of supply chain and employ an entire arsenal of adaptive dynamic system strategies enabling supply chain resilience. Also, it is not a simple sum of parts and strategies. Bonding elements and connections between the components of a supply chain and its environment enabled the amplification of resilience in the form of systemic emergence. Enablers are categorized into three subsystems: supply chain central strategy, supply chain operations, and supply chain communications. Together, these subsystems and their interconnections form the resilient supply chain system framework conceptualized by the author.

Keywords: enablers of supply chain resilience, supply chain resilience strategies, systemic approach in supply chain management, resilient supply chain system framework, ventilator challenge UK

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Authors: Yuxiao Jiang, Lingjun Meng, Mengyu Zhan, Lichunyi Zhang, Yingxia Yun

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On August 8th of 2015, a serious explosion occurred in Binhai New Area of Tianjin. This explosion led to the suspension of Tianjin-Binhai Light Rail Line 9 which was an important transportation mean connecting the old and new urban areas and the suspension causes inconvenience to commuters traveling from Tianjin to Binhai or Binhai to Tianjin and residents living by Line 9. On this regard, this paper intends to give suggestions on how to develop multi-mode transportation system rapidly and effectively after a disaster and tackle with the problems in terms of transportation infrastructure facilities. The paper proposes the idea of traffic resilience which refers to the city’s ability to restore its transportation system and reduce risks when the transportation system is destroyed by a disaster. By doing questionnaire research, on the spot study and collecting data from the internet, a GIS model is established so as to analyze the alternative traffic means used by different types of residents and study the transportation supply and demand. The result shows that along the Line 9, there is a larger demand for alternative traffic means in the place which is nearer to the downtown area. Also, the distribution of bus stations is more reasonable in the place nearer to downtown area, however, the traffic speed in the area is slower. Based on traffic resilience, the paper raises strategies to develop post-disaster multi-mode transportation system such as establishing traffic management mechanism timely and effectively, building multi-mode traffic networks, improving intelligent traffic systems and so on.

Keywords: traffic resilience, multi-mode transportation system, public traffic, transportation demand

Procedia PDF Downloads 328

Authors: Sophie Kroeling, Agnetha Schuchardt

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Striving for sustainability brings a lot of challenges for different fields of interest, e. g. security or health concerns. In Germany, civil protection is predominantly carried out by emergency responders who perform essential tasks of civil protection. Based on theoretical concepts of different psychological stress theories this contribution focuses on the question, how the resilience of emergency responders can be improved. The goal is to identify resources and successful coping strategies that help to prevent and reduce negative outcomes during or after stressful events. The paper will present results from a qualitative analysis of semi-structured qualitative interviews with 20 emergency responders. These results provide insights into the complexity of coping processes (e. g. controlling the situation, downplaying perceived personal threats through humor) and show the diversity of stressors (like complexity of the disastrous situation, intrusive press and media, or lack of social support within the organization). Self-efficacy expectation was a very important resource for coping with stressful situations. The results served as a starting point for a quantitative survey (that was conducted in March 2017), the development of education and training tools for emergency responders and the improvement of critical incident stress management processes. First results from the quantitative study with more than 700 participants show that, e. g., the emergency responders use social coping within their private social network and also within their aid organization and that both are correlated to resilience. Moreover, missing information, bureaucratic problems and social conflicts within the organization are events that the majority of the participants considered very onerous. Further results from regression analysis will be presented. The proposed paper will combine findings from the qualitative study with the quantitative results, illustrating figures and correlations with respective statements from the interviews. At the end, suggestions for the improvement of the emergency responder’s resilience are given and it is discussed how this can make a contribution to strive for civil security and furthermore a sustainable development.

Keywords: civil security, emergency responders, stress, resilience, resources

Procedia PDF Downloads 131