Systemic resilience as a response to COVID-19

Abstract

System resilience is a term of rising popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic. Governments worldwide have the opportunity to adopt a systemic, anticipatory approach to reinforcing resilience as a response to the interconnected challenges facing modern societies. These challenges, such as natural hazards, ageing population, global migration, and digitalisation are compounded by their potential to disrupt cyber, information, societal, and infrastructural systems with lasting consequences. Traditional approaches of risk assessment and management focus primarily upon hardening systems so that they are able to absorb threats before breaking. However, these approaches are inappropriate, prohibitively expensive or both for many of the issues governments will have to deal with.