Resilience is generally defined as a system’s ability to absorb and recover from unexpected adverse events that can potentially lead to significant disruptions in its functionality. As shocks of this kind become more prevalent in today’s deeply interconnected world, a growing number of organisations in both the public and private sectors are turning to resilience-based risk governance strategies.
- Resilience, Critical Infrastructure and Insurance
Today’s risk landscape is characterised by increasing complexity, interconnectedness, fast-paced changes and the importance of systemic risks, which affect critical infrastructure. Managing resilience complements more conventional forms of risk management to cope with unexpected risks, and insurance can play a role. However, there is a potential tension between acknowledging that resilience is useful for grappling with uncertainty and unquantifiability, and a basic principle and requirement from insurance, which is that the assessment of a critical infrastructure resilience should provide a measurable outcome. IRGC’s policy brief offers five factors and describes use cases to guide and inspire attempts to develop resilience-based insurance solutions, and to enhance a positive feedback between insurance and resilience. - IRGC’s Resource Guides on Resilience (2016 and 2018)
The two edited volumes provide a diverse range of state-of-the-art perspectives on resilience across numerous disciplines and domains. Contributions from thought leaders in academia, government and business highlight the practical importance of resilience building in areas such as critical infrastructure, socio-technical systems, the environment, economics and organisational management.
Critical infrastructure resilience
This report highlights positive feedback loops between insurance and resilience, and it points to five key factors in the insurance sector that can be used to guide the development of tools and methodologies for strengthening resilience.
IRGC Resource guide on resilience – Vol. 2
This collection provides in-depth and pragmatic evaluation of concepts and methods for resilience-based approaches in contrast to risk-based approaches, as proposed and practiced in different domains of science and practice.
IRGC Resource guide on resilience – Vol. 1
This collection of over 40 authored pieces offers researchers and practitioners a review of concepts, definitions and approaches of resilience, with a focus on comparing, contrasting and integrating risk and resilience, and indicators and measurements.