Resilien-tech: Recommendations for bringing resilience into practice

Abstract

Is resilience just another buzzword? What use can we make of the term and the underlying concept? Resilience is the ability to repel, prepare for, take into account, absorb, recover from and adapt ever more successfully to actual or potential adverse events. Those events are either catastrophes or processes of change with catastrophic outcome, which can have human, technical or natural causes. In Germany, there is a lack of “hands-on” approaches that try to implement some characteristics of resilient thinking into practice. By using the experience of national and international experts, the study RESILIEN-TECH comes up with a list of recommendations that can be used as guidelines for further research and development activities in the field of resilience – from developing methods for modeling and simulation of complex socio-technical systems to establishing resilience as key component for sustainable development