Risk and Resilience: Similarities and Differences

Abstract

An increasingly globalized world with wide-ranged and uncertain threats to public health, energy networks, cybersecurity, and many other interconnected facets of infrastructure and human activity, has driven governments such as within the United States, European Union, and elsewhere to further efforts to bolster national resilience and security. Resilience analysis has grown in popularity as a mechanism by which states may judge the safety, security, and flexibility of various complex systems to recover from a range of potential adverse events. Preparation for such hazards is generally thought to include measures of both passive and active resilience and have been described as including considerations of necessary actions and risk considerations before, during, and after a hazardous event takes place. Given all of this, resilience is clearly a subject with radical potential consequences in the preparedness of a nation’s energy, water, transportation, healthcare, emergency response, communications, and financial sectors to prepare for and recover from external shocks of a significant magnitude.