Engineering Resilience - A Working Definition

Engineers face an era of global risks - where global risks would meet with global responses in an ideal world.  Engineering faces a new reality in which countries and their communities are on the frontline when it comes to systemic shocks and catastrophic events.  In an increasingly interdependent and hyperconnected world - one nation's failure to address a global risk can have a ripple effect on others.

Resilience to global risks, incorporating the ability to withstand, adapt and recover, is, therefore, becoming more critical.  It becomes more important each day, each month, and each new year.  A critical starting point is a definition of resilience.  The World Economic Forum, Global Risks 2013, Eighth Edition provides the following definition:

In the wake of unprecedented disasters in recent years, "resilience" has become a popular buzzword across a wide range of disciplines, with each discipline attributing its own working definition to the term.  A definition that has long been used in engineering is that resilience is the capacity for "bouncing back faster after stress, enduring greater stresses, and being disturbed less by a given amount of stress."  The definition is commonly applied to objects, such as bridges or skyscrapers.  However, most global risks are systemic is nature, and a system - unlike an object - may show resilience not by returning exactly to its previous state, but instead by finding different ways to carry out essential functions; that is, by adapting.  For a system, and additional definition of resilience is "maintaining system function in the event of disturbance."

Too often engineering views resilience in isolation.  In the era of extreme weather event and climate change, engineers need to start thinking of a country as a system that is comprised of smaller systems and a part of larger systems.  A country's resilience is affected by the resilience of those smaller and larger systems.  Without systems thinking, engineering will never get to the point where "What makes a system resilient?" becomes the dominate question.