Resilience
Driven by a need to prepare for and recover from high consequence shocks on various social, information, and infrastructure systems, resilience has evolved as a concept dealing with how a complex system operates under stress. This is particularly relevant for the management of major risks. Resilience calls for a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on social sciences as well as natural science, and may lend itself to a variety of methodological approaches by which system resilience may be assessed. It has also been used as a concept to assess the capacity of economies and financial systems to withstand major shocks.
Governments worldwide increasingly realise that the systemic threats afflicting modern societies, such as natural hazards, ageing population, and global migration, are compounded by their potential to disrupt interconnected cyber, information, societal, and infrastructural systems with lasting consequences. The OECD and a number of partners have agreed to work together in a co-operative effort to learn from each other, share resources, and complement each other's activities.
Papers on Resilience
Systemic Resilience in Economics, Nature Physics (12 April 2022)
Digital Technologies Can Enhance Climate Resilience of Critical Infrastructure, Climate Risk Management (2022)
Exploring the Convergence of Resilience Processes and Sustainable Outcomes in Post-COVID, Post-Glasgow Economies, Sustainability (3 December 2021)
Building resilience will require compromise on efficiency, Nature Energy (20 October 2021)
Smarter Competition, More Resilient Economies!, Politeia (12 February 2021)
Combine resilience and efficiency in post-COVID societies, Nature (8 December 2020)
Resilient Financial Systems Can Soften the Next Global Financial Crisis
A Systemic Resilience Approach to Dealing with Covid-19 and Future Shocks
Bouncing forward: a resilience approach to dealing with COVID-19 and future systemic shocks, published in Environmental Systems and Decisions; National Institutes of Health Nature US National Library of Medicine Public Health Emergency Collection and WHO COVID-19 Global literature on Coronavirus Disease (25 May 2020)
Resilience Strategies and Approaches to Contain Systemic Threats ιι Face aux menaces systémiques, des stratégies et des approches fondées sur la résilience
This paper defines concepts related to systemic threats and reviews the analytical and governance approaches and strategies to manage these threats and build resilience to contain them. It builds on the report Resilience Activities at the OECD: Current Practice and Future Directions and was discussed by OECD members and committees at the NAEC Group conference on Averting Systemic Collapse
Resilience at OECD: Current State and Future Directions. This paper (pdf), undertaken by staff at the US Army Corps of Engineers and the OECD NAEC Unit, outlines how OECD Directorates are working to build safeguards, buffers and resilience to physical, economic, social and evironmental shocks.
Resilience: Plan - Absorb - Recover - Adapt
When disaster strikes, podcast with Igor Linkov
Pandemics, flooding, cyber attack, wildfire. These are just some of the things that threaten our critical infrastructure and supply chains. We’ve engineered these for maximum efficiency and minimum risk. But what about resilience? Igor Linkov is the Risk and Decision Science Focus Area Lead at the US Army Engineer Research and Development Center and an Adjunct Professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He discusses how to design for systems failure.
Seminars and Workshops on Resilience
Financing Resilient Health Systems: Is there a Trade-off between Efficiency and Resilience?
NAEC seminar with the Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs, 30 May 2022
Building more resilient health systems will require smarter investments to be better prepared for future crises. Smart investments in health resilience protect economies from destabilising shocks, and protect people from premature death. The challenge is to make these investments whilst maintaining the financial sustainability of health systems.
The Resilient Society - Markus K. Brunnermeier, 10 February 2022
"The Resilient Society" addresses business leaders, policymakers, and concerned global citizens and argues that the only way to protect our social and economic institutions from climate change, cyberattacks, and other shocks to come is to build resilience and invest in mechanisms for bouncing back.
A NAEC seminar in association with Rebuilding Macroeconomics and The Fields Institute (11 May 2021)
SOCIO-ECONOMIC RESILIENCE: WHAT IS IT, AND HOW CAN IT BE ENHANCED?The Covid 19 pandemic illustrates the tight interconnectedness of our social and economic systems. As communities strive towards a more optimistic future, one core question has emerged: how can the recovery be supported, while at the same time safeguarding our social and economic systems against future stresses that will inevitably occur? Stabilisation measures are very necessary, but they can become permanent and may even obscure the need for deeper and more complex underlying changes. This may leave economies more, rather than less, vulnerable and with less capacity to respond to future shocks.
This inter-disciplinary panel discusses how to build and manage more resilient systems: one that places economics in relation to other critical fields such as the environment, engineering, science and politics. Fundamental uncertainty has to be embraced if we are to truly build capacity to anticipate, absorb, recover from, and adapt to a wide array of systemic threats. Some uncertainties can be managed by building pre-emptive buffers, monetary and fiscal policies and government support programmes. Deeper uncertainties require recognising that the social system underpins our economic system and must have the institutional capacity to respond accordingly.
New Approaches to Economic Challenges (NAEC) seminar on intergovernmental resilience, 13 April 2018:
>> Linking different forms of resilience (pdf), Igor Linkov, Team Lead, US Army Engineer Research and Development Center, US Army Corps of Engineers an Adjunct Professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University
>> Resilience in flood risk management (pdf), Anna Serra-Llobet, Aix-Marseille Université, University of California, Berkeley
Presentation of work on fairness and resilience by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, NAEC seminar, 23 October 2017:
>> What makes a fair society? Insights and evidence (pdf), Vladimir Sucha, Director General, JRC
>> JRC work on resilience (pdf), Francesca Campolongo, Head of the Finance and Economy Unit in the Growth and Innovation Directorate, European Commission
A technical-level meeting at the OECD, on 13 October 2017, aimed to reach consensus on a project plan to develop an Inter-governmental Approach to Resilience.
>> Agenda (pdf)
Resilience: State of Science and Practice within OECD, NAEC seminar, 12 June 2017
>> The risk of not being resilient (pdf), Igor Linkov, US OECD
USOECD Science Fellow Presents Analysis of OECD’s Work on Resilience