Design for societal resilience

Abstract

The global impacts of disaster risks are on the rise. Moreover, evidence shows that the severity of damage will increase exponentially. In 2019, there were 395 natural disasters that caused 11,755 deaths. Literature and practice indicate that diversification of disaster risk management (DRM) approaches can make communities more resilient. One notable bottleneck in adopting diverse DRM approaches is the historical dominance of natural and technological sciences with little contribution from social sciences. Thus, a heterogeneous social-technical approach to DRM is rare and risk governance challenges are hardly understood. We conducted a systematic literature and practice review and extracted data to develop and answer five sub-questions. After that, we reviewed relevant information and selected eight risk evaluation approaches. We made comparisons and used the input to design the Risk Evaluation Diversity-aiding Approach (RED-A). The approach consists of 12 criteria and a checklist with 22 items. RED-A provides guidance to DRM researchers and practitioners when conducting socio-technical risk evaluations. It helps identify cognitive biases in the ongoing DRM process that may largely impact the quality of risk evaluation procedures. The goal of the 22-item checklist is to ensure that the 12 RED-A criteria are incorporated as much as possible to support the progressive transition towards a heterogeneous social-technical DRM approach. Finally, the RED-A criteria and checklist are applied in the Solotvyno municipality context (in Ukraine), to illustrate the use of the approach.