Resilient Europe and Societies by Innovating Local Communities (RESILOC)

Resilient Europe and Societies by Innovating Local Communities (RESILOC) works under the theory that more resilient societies are able to recover and adapt following natural disasters and ultimately transform into a stronger community than before.

RESILOC project brings together a multidisciplinary and multinational team in order to create a holistic framework of studies, methods and software instruments. This framework will combine ‘hard’ data around natural disasters with less tangible evidence around human behaviour with the aim of identifying opportunities for improving community preparedness and response to natural disasters. The objectives of the project are to:

• Increase the understanding of resilience in societies and local communities
• Innovate on the strategies for improving resilience
• Innovate on tools and solutions for improving resilience in communities
• Communicate, demonstrate and assess the validity of approaches, solutions and tools in field trials
• Have an impact and define concrete steps towards a more resilient society

What are we doing?

The first stage of the project involves conducting a study of the existing literature around cases relating to resilience from Europe and around the world. From this, we’ll be able to classify the functions that pertain to the resilience of communities and build upon the current understanding of how resilience is measured in cities through an exploration of the human aspects involved. This will lead to the creation of resilience indexes for different communities. The Tavistock Institute’s main involvement is around analysing the existing evidence around risk perception and how this affects the behaviour and resilience of communities, though we are leading on other tasks throughout the project. Currently, we are conducting a survey which explores people’s risk perceptions and how this impacts on their behaviour. In the next phase of the project, the resilience indexes will be assessed and simulations conducted to explore what the impacts would be on communities were certain measures taken to increase resilience. This will lead to the identification of new approaches to increase resilience, such as improved communication strategies, solutions to improving critical infrastructure or new technological solutions. The final result of the project will be two software products:

• The RESILOC inventory: A comprehensive and ‘living’ structure for collecting, classifying and using information on cities and local communities. This will be a live tool for stakeholders who seek to study and improve on community resilience.
• The RESILOC Cloud-based platform: A site for assessing and calculating the resilience indexes of any participating city or community, using the RESILOC inventory as a repository. We anticipate that this will be used for developing localised strategies and verifying their impacts on the resilience of the community.

Why does this project matter?

In the face of climate change, natural disasters are predicted to become more frequent and severe; the effects are already being seen in the form of flooding events and forest fires around the world. Communities, therefore, need to know what works in terms of disaster management in order to more effectively prepare and recover from these events. Furthermore, a key aspect of RESILOC is its focus on the part that the community has to play in increasing resilience. Whilst previous projects have often looked at building resilience through improvements in critical infrastructure, we will expand upon this body of knowledge by looking at how human factors such as social capital, citizen perceptions of risk and behaviours come into play.

Where can I find out more about this topic?

For more information, you can visit the dedicated RESILOC project website

Tavistock Project Team:

Thomas Spielhofer Kerstin Junge Joe Cullen Richard Allen Giorgia Iacopini Anna Sophie Hahne Rachel Hastings-Caplan