Rethinking Infrastructure Resilience Assessment with Human Sentiment Reactions on Social Media in Disasters

The objective of this study is to propose and test a theoretical framework which integrates the human sentiment reactions on social media in disasters into infrastructure resilience assessment. Infrastructure resilience assessment is important for reducing adverse consequences of infrastructure failures and promoting human well-being in natural disasters. Integrating societal impacts of infrastructure disruptions can enable a better understanding of infrastructure performance in disasters and human capacities under the stress of disruptions. However, the consideration of societal impacts of infrastructure disruptions is limited in existing studies for infrastructure resilience assessment. The reasons are twofold: first, an integrative theoretical framework for connecting the societal impacts to infrastructure resilience is missing; and second, gathering empirical data for capturing societal impacts of disaster disruptions is challenging. This study proposed a theoretical framework to examine the relationship between the societal impacts and infrastructure performance in disasters using social media data. Sentiments of human messages for relevant infrastructure systems are adopted as an indicator of societal impacts of infrastructure disruptions. A case study for electricity and transportation systems in Houston during the 2017 Hurricane Harvey was conducted to illustrate the application of the proposed framework. We find a relation between human sentiment and infrastructure status and validate it by extracting situational information from relevant tweets and official public data. The findings enable a better understanding of societal expectations and collective sentiments regarding the infrastructure disruptions. Practically, the findings also improve the ability of infrastructure management agencies in infrastructure prioritization and planning decisions

Community Segmentation and Inclusive Social Media Listening

Social media analytics provide a generalized picture of situational awareness from the conversations happening among communities present in social media channels that are that are, or risk being affected by crises. The generalized nature of results from these analytics leaves underrepresented communities in the background. When considering social media analytics, concerns, sentiment, and needs are perceived as homogenous. However, offline, the community is diverse, often segmented by age group, occupation, or language, to name a few. Through our analysis of interviews from professionals using social media as a source of information in public service organizations, we argue that practitioners might not be perceiving this segmentation from the social media conversation. In addition, practitioners who are aware of this limitation, agree that there is room for improvement and resort to alternative mechanisms to understand, reach, and provide services to these communities in need. Thus, we analyze current perceptions and activities around segmentation and provide suggestions that could inform the design of social media analytics tools that support inclusive public services for all, including persons with disabilities and from other disadvantaged groups.publishedVersionPaid open acces

The Global Risks Report 2016, 11th Edition

Now in its 11th edition, The Global Risks Report 2016 draws attention to ways that global risks could evolve and interact in the next decade. The year 2016 marks a forceful departure from past findings, as the risks about which the Report has been warning over the past decade are starting to manifest themselves in new, sometimes unexpected ways and harm people, institutions and economies. Warming climate is likely to raise this year's temperature to 1° Celsius above the pre-industrial era, 60 million people, equivalent to the world's 24th largest country and largest number in recent history, are forcibly displaced, and crimes in cyberspace cost the global economy an estimated US$445 billion, higher than many economies' national incomes. In this context, the Reportcalls for action to build resilience – the "resilience imperative" – and identifies practical examples of how it could be done.The Report also steps back and explores how emerging global risks and major trends, such as climate change, the rise of cyber dependence and income and wealth disparity are impacting already-strained societies by highlighting three clusters of risks as Risks in Focus. As resilience building is helped by the ability to analyse global risks from the perspective of specific stakeholders, the Report also analyses the significance of global risks to the business community at a regional and country-level

Operationalizing Digital Resilience – A Systematic Literature Review on Opportunities and Challenges

Building a digital resilience (i.e., capabilities to design, deploy and use information systems (IS) to adjust to changes caused by external shocks) may prepare individuals, organizations and other institutions for future disruptions caused by global crises. To be able to monitor the emergence and development of digital resilience, one needs to be able to measure it. Currently, there is no consensus in IS literature on how to conceptualize or operationalize resilience. By conducting a systematic literature review, we identify traditional and innovative operationalization approaches. We find scale-based quantitative methods to be most prominent, followed by qualitative analyses of resilience indicators through interviews and case studies. We identify advantages and limitations of each approach and encourage authors to move beyond the boundaries of traditional methods and incorporate innovative approaches – some of which we present in this paper – to operationalize digital resilience in a tailored, context-specific way. Challenges and opportunities are discussed

People-centric Emission Reduction in Buildings: A Data-driven and Network Topology-based Investigation

There is a growing consensus among policymakers that we need a human-centric low-carbon transition. There are few studies on how to do it effectively, especially in the context of emissions reduction in the building sector. It is critical to investigate public sentiment and attitudes towards this aspect of climate action, as the building and construction sector accounts for 40% of global carbon emissions. Our methodology involves a multi-method approach, using a data-driven exploration of public sentiment using 256,717 tweets containing #emission and #building between 2009 - 2021. Using graph theory-led metrics, a network topology-based investigation of hashtag co-occurrences was used to extract highly influential hashtags. Our results show that public sentiment is reactive to global climate policy events. Between 2009-2012, #greenbuilding, #emissions were highly influential, shaping the public discourse towards climate action. In 2013-2016, #lowcarbon, #construction and #energyefficiency had high centrality scores, which were replaced by hashtags like #climatetec, #netzero, #climateaction, #circulareconomy, and #masstimber, #climatejustice in 2017-2021. Results suggest that the current building emission reduction context emphasises the social and environmental justice dimensions, which is pivotal to an effective people-centric policymaking

What is Uncertainty and Why Does it Matter?

Uncertainty defines our times. Whether it is in relation to climate change, disease outbreaks, financial volatility, natural disasters or political settlements, every media headline seems to assert that things are uncertain, and increasingly so. Uncertainty, where we do not know the probabilities of either likelihoods or outcomes, is different to risk, the implications of which are explored in this paper through five different ways of thinking about uncertainty, derived from highly diverse literatures encompassing societal, political, cultural, practice and individual perspectives. The paper continues by examining how these perspectives relate to four domains: finance and banking; critical infrastructures; disease outbreaks and climate change; natural hazards and disasters. Reflecting on these experiences, the paper argues that embracing uncertainty raises some fundamental challenges. It means questioning simple, linear perspectives on modernity and progress. It means rethinking expertise and including diverse knowledges in deliberations about the future. It means understanding how uncertainties emerge in social, political and economic contexts, and how uncertainties affect different people, depending on class, gender, race, age and other dimensions of social difference. And, if uncertainty is not reducible to probabilistic risk, it means a radically different approach to governance; one that rejects control-oriented, technocratic approaches in favour of more tentative, adaptive, hopeful and caring responses. The paper concludes by asking whether we can learn from those who live with and from uncertainty – including pastoralists in marginal settings – as part of a wider conversation about embracing uncertainties to meet the challenges of our turbulent world

Unprecedented natures? An anatomy of the Chennai floods

Between November and December 2015, the southern Indian city of Chennai (alongside the northern coastal regions in the state of Tamil Nadu) experienced torrential rains with unanticipated flood consequences. Notoriously known as India’s “water scarcity capital”, instead of the proverbial ‘poor monsoons’, a series of low-pressure depressions with ‘record-breaking’ rainfall submerged the city rapidly, as homes and apartments flooded, communications were cut, and transportation came to a standstill including the closure of the airport. Even as environmental activists took the state and its allied actors (in the development and planning sector) to task over what they considered was a deliberate and reckless ‘urbanisation of disaster’, the state sought refuge in the argument that this was an unprecedented (global) weather anomaly. Recognising the need for a more robust (post) disaster discussion, this paper offers an anatomy of the floods that begs a broader rethink of twenty-first century urban disasters and argues that the current discourse offered by the social science of disaster is insufficient in unravelling the complex spatial and environmental histories behind disasters. It goes beyond setting up a mere critique of capitalist urbanisation to offer a cogent debunking of the deeply engrained assumptions about the unprecedented nature of disasters. It does so by dismantling three commonly invoked arguments that transgress any kind of environmental common sense: 1. The 100-year flood fallacy, 2. The ensuing debates around environmental knowledges and subjectivities, and 3. The need to spatially rescale (and regionalise) the rationale of the ‘urbanisation of disaster’. It concludes by raising concerns over the persistence of a resilience discourse, one that relies on the will of the ‘expert’ underwriting not only a non-specific techno-scientific approach but also perpetuates a politicisation of risk that shows little promise of accommodating new epistemologies that are socio-ecologically progressive

Future-proofing the state: managing risks, responding to crises and building resilience

Summary: This book focuses on the challenges facing governments and communities in preparing for and responding to major crises — especially the hard to predict yet unavoidable natural disasters ranging from earthquakes and tsunamis to floods and bushfires, as well as pandemics and global economic crises. Future-proofing the state and our societies involves decision-makers developing capacities to learn from recent ‘disaster’ experiences in order to be better placed to anticipate and prepare for foreseeable challenges. To undertake such futureproofing means taking long-term (and often recurring) problems seriously, managing risks appropriately, investing in preparedness, prevention and mitigation, reducing future vulnerability, building resilience in communities and institutions, and cultivating astute leadership. In the past we have often heard calls for ‘better future-proofing’ in the aftermath of disasters, but then neglected the imperatives of the message. Future-Proofing the State is organised around four key themes: how can we better predict and manage the future; how can we transform the short-term thinking shaped by our political cycles into more effective long-term planning; how can we build learning into our preparations for future policies and management; and how can we successfully build trust and community resilience to meet future challenges more adequately