Building Resilience for Global Challenges at the International Conference on Resilient Systems (ICRS) 2024
A recap of key events and highlights at the recent international conference
More than 150 global academics, practitioners, and partners with expertise in resilience gathered at the International Conference on Resilient Systems (ICRS) 2024 in Singapore on 28-30 August. The conference featured 110 thematic presentations and group discussions, offering attendees the opportunity to hear from four esteemed keynote speakers, each a leading expert in resilience.
This year, SEC’s Future Resilient Systems (FRS) programme was honoured to co-organise and host the ICRS in Singapore, together with organising and content partners - the external page 4TU Centre for Resilience Engineering (4TU.RE), external page Technische Universität Darmstadt (TUD), ETH Zürich, the external page Stevens Institute of Technology, ETH Risk Centre, external page emergenCITY, external page National University of Singapore (NUS), and external page Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
The first day kicked off with welcome addresses by our Guests of Honour - external page H.E. Frank Grütter, Swiss Ambassador to Singapore and Brunei, and Prof. external page Subodh Mhaisalkar, Executive Director of Academic Research, CREATE, and the National Research Foundation.
Dr Jonas Joerin, Director of the Future Resilient Systems Programme at SEC, Prof. external page Tina Comes, Scientific Director of 4TU Centre for Resilience Engineering, and Prof. external page Max Mühlhäuser, Directorate member of emergenCITY and Head of the Telecooperation Lab at the Technische Universität Darmstadt also delivered their speeches to urge attendees to fully engage with the wealth of expertise and insights at the conference to enhance their understanding of resilience.
Following this, Prof. external page Cynthia Chen's keynote speech was on her application of place-based models and resilience loss analysis to quantify the potential for resource sharing within communities during emergencies. Field studies in Seattle, U.S., and Nagoya, Japan, emphasised the importance of social ties and sharing captains in effective distribution of survival and infrastructure resources. Overall, key findings reveal that communities have significant physical and social resources, and community resilience in both urban and rural communities can be significantly enhanced by leveraging community-based resources.
The second keynote speech by Prof. external page Gyöngyi Kovács focused on two perspectives of supply chain resilience: business continuity management and security of supply. Using examples from Finland and global supply chains during the COVID-19 pandemic, she highlighted the cascading effects and interdependencies across sectors and within systems from a local to global scale. The key point made was that global events such as climate change and pandemics are interconnected and cannot be tackled in isolation.
A highlight of Day 2 of the ICRS was Assistant Prof. external page Perrine Hamel's keynote speech which outlined the importance of incorporating greenery and nature-based solutions in urban planning to enhance environmental resilience against heat, climate change, and biodiversity loss. Using case studies from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore, she showcased the benefits of low-cost sensors and remote sensing for analysing individual exposure to environmental risks. She also highlighted the challenges and complexity of socio-ecological-technological systems, noting that time and resources are crucial for building urban environmental resilience.
The day also concluded with a visit to the Singapore Botanic Gardens, the city-state's sole United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) World Heritage Site for a conference dinner.
Over the three days of the conference, the ICRS presenters showcased their latest research insights on a wide range of topics related to resilience.
Some key messages conveyed in the thematic and group sessions were as follows:
- Infrastructure and System Resilience: Case studies from Switzerland and Singapore highlighted the importance of engineering high availability and evaluating the effects on regional economies. Distributing functionality across multiple sub-systems enhances resilience, and artificial intelligence can serve as a valuable technology in designing resilient systems. Decision-making tools aid in resource allocation towards robustness or recovery strategies, informed by stakeholder risk attitudes.
- Community and Social resilience: As countries face challenges from societal tensions and fragmentation, social resilience is increasingly important. To enhance social resilience, interventions should focus on people's capacities and perceptions. Differences between social archetypes are more significant than socio-demographic or socio-economic variations in understanding social resilience.
- Disaster Resilience: Water-related hazards require localised mitigation strategies tailored to specific contexts. This was evidenced through discussions of several case studies; risk mitigation for droughts in Switzerland, floods in the Netherlands and England, and tsunamis in Chile.
- Digitalisation and Resilience: Despite a high penetration of mobile communication devices in Hong Kong, the uptake of smart mobility services still encounters challenges. This case study highlighted the importance of resilient cyber systems in smart cities yet the added value of resilience concepts beyond traditional reliability and risk strategies requires further research.
- Heat Resilience: Urban heat modelling and mitigation are increasingly vital for city planning. The external page Digital Urban Climate Twin (DUCT) model and Microclimate Digital Platform were cited as tools for their capability to predict urban heat effects in Singapore. It was also addressed that effective heat resilience strategies must consider economic, physiological, and behavioural factors, including appropriate compensation for outdoor workers.
- Methods and Techniques of Resilience: Various attributes of resilience have been defined in scientific research, but validating socio-technical models are necessary for infrastructure to account for shifts in user behaviour and other dynamic factors during crises.
Amidst the final day of interactive thematic and group sessions, another highlight was a keynote speech by Prof. external page Shunichi Koshimura, Deputy Director at the International Research Institute of Disaster Science, Tohoku University, Japan. He introduced how digital twins can support the monitoring, forecast, and response to disasters. Drawing on various recent disaster examples from Japan, he demonstrated how modern sensing technologies, such as mobile phone signals, provide near real-time data on people's exposure to natural hazards such as earthquakes, floods, and more. He concluded that future research may focus on fusion of sensing, computing, and AI to better forecast and understand disaster processes.
As we conclude this year’s edition of the ICRS, we look forward to the next; which will be held during 23-25 March 2026 in Delft, the Netherlands.
We look forward to seeing you at the next ICRS!