Resilience of infrastructure systems at scale

This whitepaper suggests that resilience is a systemic level capacity and has multiple dimensions. The systemic resilience origins from different scales and develops through different sets of ecological, psychological, technical, organisational and personal processes. When extreme events occur (e.g. natural or man-made), these different strands of resilience-shaper processes join together collectively to enable a particular system (i.e. an ecosystem, an organisation, an infrastructure, an individual, a city, or a nation) to withstand adversity or in other words to be resilient. The manifestation of resilience can be detected differently depending on the nature of systems through for instance an emergence of desirable properties such as shock absorption in ecological systems, redundancy and robustness of technical systems, flexibility and agility in businesses, adaptability and transformability in social-ecological systems, positive adaptation and last but not least thriving and evolutionary leap to better futures in resilient individuals.