Emerging Implications for Geospatial Research on Critical Infrastructure Resilience

Keywords: Complexity, Critical Infrastructure, Urban Resilience, Geospatial Modeling, GIScience
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 13

Abstract

The past decade has shown that the threat landscape for critical infrastructure (CI) such as energy, communications, healthcare systems, and transportation is expanding. In addition to extreme weather and climate change, these systems must be resilient against rapid technological changes, cyber-attacks, social upheavals, and pandemics – often in sequence or concurrence. In a future characterized by increasing complexity and accelerating change, infrastructure resilience itself is evolving and CI must adapt to maintain essential functions in the face of evolving system dynamics and uncertainty. Amid the recent and still unfolding COVID-19 crisis, a few themes emerge that illuminate CI resilience as a complex system in the 21st-century, such as the prevalence of concurrent crises and the need for dynamic definitions and operationalization of infrastructure criticality. This talk will discuss these themes along with two broad pathways to address the increasing complexity involved in CI resilience: (1) the role of decentralization and centralization of infrastructure as coupled network-governance systems, and (2) safe-to-fail approaches that leverage socio-ecological-technical capabilities to manage failures. Furthermore, a discussion will follow based on these themes and pathways regarding the kinds of geospatial data, modeling approaches, and frameworks necessary to generate adequate knowledge and tools for disaster management and public safety. This work helps set the stage for a paradigm shift in geospatial research and support tools toward conceptualizing infrastructure as complex systems in an era of rapid change and uncertainty.