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How Hazards Turn Into Disasters
Perspectives of Emergency Responders
Resilient infrastructure planning in refugee and internally displaced person settlements
A systematic review of scholarly and grey literature
The findings reveal an uneven focus across infrastructure sectors, with shelter, energy, and WASH dominating the literature. Resilience in the scholarly literature is primarily conceptualized through robustness, adaptability, and transformability, with limited integration of preparedness and recovery, and these dimensions are rarely addressed holistically. Furthermore, resilience is constrained by interrelated factors, like resource limitations, weak coordination among actors, land ownership, and institutional constraints.
These results highlight the need for integrated, cross-sectoral planning approaches that incorporate underexplored infrastructure sectors, address underemphasized resilience dimensions, and embed refugee and IDP settlements within host countries' regional planning frameworks to alleviate constraints to resilience enhancement. ...
The findings reveal an uneven focus across infrastructure sectors, with shelter, energy, and WASH dominating the literature. Resilience in the scholarly literature is primarily conceptualized through robustness, adaptability, and transformability, with limited integration of preparedness and recovery, and these dimensions are rarely addressed holistically. Furthermore, resilience is constrained by interrelated factors, like resource limitations, weak coordination among actors, land ownership, and institutional constraints.
These results highlight the need for integrated, cross-sectoral planning approaches that incorporate underexplored infrastructure sectors, address underemphasized resilience dimensions, and embed refugee and IDP settlements within host countries' regional planning frameworks to alleviate constraints to resilience enhancement.
Artificial intelligence promises rapid information processing, analysis and decisions. Yet, guidance on what to automate, when, and to what degree, remains limited for Human-AI teams. Case-based empirical studies provide rich context, but a framework for systematic exploration of Human–AI team performance is missing. This paper introduces a conceptual model for Human–AI teaming that integrates levels of automation, trust dynamics, and organizational functions within a social networked, agent based perspective. Building on the crisis information management cycle, it models sensing, analysis, sharing, and decision-making as an iterative loop in which automation shapes latency, reliability, and trust. As a proof of concept, we developed a minimal model with results showing how automation regimes, forecast horizons, and trust configurations affect performance through the concept. The model provides a starting point for users to explore cascading effects, authority shifts, and trade-offs between performance and meaningful human control.
Prioritisation Recommendation Mapping (PrioReMap)
A method for supporting relief coordination in flood disaster response
To effectively coordinate the response to a flood disaster, decision-makers have to prioritise areas that are in most urgent need of assistance. This prioritisation often has to be carried out under time pressure and on the basis of incomplete information, creating a high cognitive load for decision-makers. Methods that integrate Bayesian networks into GIS to draw spatial inference can inform this prioritisation process. However, existing approaches are not equipped to address the time pressure and unclear information-scape that is typical for a flood disaster. In this work, we present a novel spatial inference method for area prioritisation that is designed to address these time and information constraints. The core of this method is a GIS-informed Bayesian network, integrated into an expected loss framework, that can be set up during the preparation phase. The method can then quickly provide area prioritisation recommendations for disaster relief, which has the potential to support decisions-makers during the response phase. In this way, our method provides a means of shifting some of the most time-consuming aspects of the decision-making process from the time-critical disaster response phase to the less critical preparation phase. To illustrate how our method can support rapid and transparent area prioritisation, we present a case study of an extreme flood scenario in Cologne, Germany.
Artificial Intelligence as a Coordination Mechanism in Crisis Management
An Integrative Framework and Applicative Examples
Using novel data and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in crisis resilience and management is increasingly prominent. AI technologies have broad applications, from detecting damages to prioritizing assistance, and have increasingly supported human decision-making. Understanding how AI amplifies or diminishes specific values and how responsible AI practices and governance can mitigate harmful outcomes and protect vulnerable populations is critical. This study presents a responsible AI roadmap embedded in the Crisis Information Management Circle. Through three focus groups with participants from diverse organizations and sectors and a literature review, we develop six propositions addressing important challenges and considerations in crisis resilience and management. Our roadmap covers a broad spectrum of interwoven challenges and considerations on collecting, analyzing, sharing, and using information. We discuss principles including equity, fairness, explainability, transparency, accountability, privacy, security, inter-organizational coordination, and public engagement. Through examining issues around AI systems for crisis management, we dissect the inherent complexities of information management, governance, and decision-making in crises and highlight the urgency of responsible AI research and practice. The ideas presented in this paper are among the first attempts to establish a roadmap for actors, including researchers, governments, and practitioners, to address important considerations for responsible AI in crisis resilience and management.
Maladaptation in Supply Chains
The Unintended Consequences of Adaptive Actions Aimed at Enhancing Resilience
Supply chains are increasingly suffering from widespread disruptions, leading to growing interest in supply chain resilience. Adaptation, a central concept of resilience, is conventionally assumed to effectively manage these disruptions. However, actions aimed at adaptation can have adverse consequences, a phenomenon known in the climate change literature as maladaptation. Supply chain studies discuss only a few instances of maladaptation, without providing an overarching logic that explains why and how such maladaptation emerges. This study brings the concept of maladaptation into supply chain research by developing a conceptual framework that combines maladaptation theory from climate change literature with resilience theory from social–ecological systems literature. This framework identifies the dynamic mechanisms of cross-level interaction, delayed feedback, path dependence, and governance, through which maladaptation emerges. The framework explains how specific supply chain characteristics, such as compressed timeframes, coordination, and competition, accelerate these mechanisms. Through the conceptualization of maladaptation in supply chain management, this study advances resilience theory by establishing a framework to analyze when and under what circumstances adaptive actions aimed at enhancing resilience become maladaptive.
Safeguarding urban functionality
A pre-disaster planning framework for identifying important urban assets in multi-risk recovery
FutureScapes
A design thinking approach to blending computational models and scenario narratives for urban futures
Where will they settle?
On the role of uncertainty and choice of algorithm for humanitarian decisions
Migration is among the most uncertain and contested topics for policymaking. The increasing number of migrants and refugees globally necessitates effective planning and management, particularly in addressing infrastructure needs such as access to healthcare. While efforts to accom- modate a surge of refugees prioritise primary needs, improving structural access to essential infrastructure becomes imperative over time. However, the path-dependent nature of the expansion of refugee settlements poses challenges for infrastructure development. Existing facility location models for infrastructure planning overlook the interplay of infrastructure growth and human behaviour. This chapter presents a study on the interplay between the settling preferences of refugees (behaviour) and the location of healthcare facilities as essential infrastructure. We develop a data-based approach that combines an agent-based model representing decision beha- viour with facility location optimisation models for infrastructure planning. Through a case study of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, home to over 1 million Rohingya refugees, we demonstrate the implications of different optimisa- tion approaches and thereby explore how and in how far digital tools influence policymaking on one of the most contested and uncertain topics in the current policy landscape. Our findings underscore the importance of integrating uncertainty about human behaviour in infrastructure decisions.
Patient flow logistics from disaster to care
A scoping review of actors, transport modes and decision problems
Sudden-onset disasters impact the health and well-being of millions of people each year. Typically, a sudden-onset disaster will lead to a surge of patients that require immediate acute care, even though health infrastructure and resources may be destroyed or not accessible. The challenge of patient flow logistics is transporting those in need of acute care rapidly to locations where they can be treated. The fields and disciplines tackling these challenges, therefore, span from disaster-related to health-related logistics, but it is not known whether and how research and approaches across these fields align. This study aims to scope this emergent field, identify research gaps and develop a conceptual framework that bridges the disaster-related and health-related logistics literature.
This paper follows a scoping review protocol. The authors screened an initial 8,491 papers, of which 127 were retained for a full-text review. Analyzing these papers, the authors map out the key concepts such as actors, locations, transportation modes and decision problems used in the literature. The study identifies research gaps and synthesize the findings into a conceptual framework to guide future research.
This review identified four gaps in the existing literature: (1) The literature focuses primarily on earthquakes and terrorist attacks, limited attention is given to other sudden-onset disaster types despite their frequency; (2) The literature focuses on formal actors such as health providers or civil protection bodies, while communities are largely portrayed as passive patients or victims; (3) Actors are largely assumed to follow standardized protocols, often ignoring emergent roles or behavioral changes typical for sudden-onset disasters; (4) Objectives predominantly relate to either efficiency or effectiveness, neglecting fairness and multiobjective problems.
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this scoping review is the first to explore the different aspects of patient logistics in sudden-onset disasters by bridging the disaster-related and health-related literature.
Keeping healthcare afloat
A protocol for a 5-year multi-sited interdisciplinary research project into preparedness of healthcare for floods in the Netherlands
Introduction: The 2021 European floods in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands significantly impacted healthcare. With climate change increasing flood risks, healthcare preparedness is essential. Floods affect healthcare directly and indirectly by disrupting patient access, damaging infrastructure and impeding care continuity. Our interdisciplinary research in the Netherlands systematically assesses flood impacts on healthcare, optimises disaster preparedness, patient logistics, and continuity and explores crisis governance, incorporating lessons from coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19). Methods: Our multi-sited, interdisciplinary project titled “Pandemic lessons for flood disaster preparedness” includes literature reviews on: (i) the (in) direct impacts of floods on healthcare, (ii) disaster decision-making strategies and (iii) patient logistics during crises. Empirically, ethnographic methods (interviews, focus groups, document analyses, and observations) will: (a) assess hospital flood preparedness, (b) explore decision-making and crisis management strategies and (c) analyse the dynamics of health system governance during floods. Data from these sources and flood scenarios will inform models on healthcare impacts and decision-making, culminating in a simulation game for research and training. Discussion: This study offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to understanding and improving healthcare system preparedness for floods. By integrating diverse fields such as healthcare governance, disaster risk management, logistics and hydraulic engineering, we provide a unique lens on resilience. A key strength is the incorporation of lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing us to draw parallels between pandemic response and flood preparedness. In addition, our simulation game serves as a robust tool for translating knowledge into practice. However, the study’s reliance on collaboration with busy healthcare and disaster response professionals may limit engagement. Moreover, the absence of direct public and patient involvement in the research design, though partially mitigated by engaging representative organizations, presents a potential limitation. Lastly, the challenge of obtaining real-time data from flood events could introduce recall bias, but triangulation of various data sources aims to address this issue. Despite these challenges, the study’s integration of long-term data from recent floods and focus on healthcare-specific crisis governance provides valuable insights for improving disaster preparedness.
Emergency Response Inference Mapping (ERIMap)
A Bayesian network-based method for dynamic observation processing
In emergencies, high stake decisions often have to be made under time pressure and strain. In order to support such decisions, information from various sources needs to be collected and processed rapidly. The information available tends to be temporally and spatially variable, uncertain, and sometimes conflicting, leading to potential biases in decisions. Currently, there is a lack of systematic approaches for information processing and situation assessment which meet the particular demands of emergency situations. To address this gap, we present a Bayesian network-based method called ERIMap that is tailored to the complex information-scape during emergencies. The method enables the systematic and rapid processing of heterogeneous and potentially uncertain observations and draws inferences about key variables of an emergency. It thereby reduces complexity and cognitive load for decision makers. The output of the ERIMap method is a dynamically evolving and spatially resolved map of beliefs about key variables of an emergency that is updated each time a new observation becomes available. The method is illustrated in a case study in which an emergency response is triggered by an accident causing a gas leakage on a chemical plant site.
High Impact Low Probability events (HILPs), often referred to as outliers, are becoming more important in disaster management because they are linked to complex risks and tipping points in interconnected systems. Recent events, such as the cascading effects of the coronavirus pandemic, rising uncertainties from global geopolitical instability, and successive and concurrent extremes driven by climate change, underscore the limitations of relying solely on severe but plausible scenarios for risk practitioners and policymakers. Despite the critical need to integrate HILPs into risk assessment models and emergency preparedness, the field is fragmented, with inconsistent definitions and methodologies. We present a perspective developed under the HORIZON AGILE project (AGnostic risk management for high Impact Low probability Events), which introduces two comprehensive definitions of HILPs and a taxonomy designed to enhance risk assessment, resilience analysis, and crisis management. We provide a validated scientific definition for the academic community and an operational definition tailored for practitioners and stakeholders. Additionally, our taxonomy offers a structured framework to address outlier events that often fall below traditional risk thresholds, ensuring that low-probability, high-impact scenarios with cascading and concurrent dynamics are effectively integrated into risk registers, legislation, and standards development. This study shows how this approach improves methods like stress testing and scenario modelling, especially for the loss of critical services. This empowers policymakers, practitioners, and stakeholders to include more scenarios in their strategies, enhancing resilience and preparedness.