Resilience News

Advancement in technologies such as sensors, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence are helping communities better prepare for and respond to disasters. Companies and governments are working on this application of new technology to old problems both because of the increasing severity of damage caused by natural disasters and the potential to reduce the enormous cost of disasters. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that climate and weather events caused $1.5 trillion in damage between 1980 and 2017. The technologies that companies and researchers are developing can be as simple as the Qatari organization AIDR using social media platforms to accurately map disaster sites and coordinating logistics or rely on new tools such as the Ontario utility company, Hydro One, using IBM’s outage-prediction tool to coordinate recovery.

Global Resilience Institute research assistant Erin Bourque, CSSH ‘19, and Honors student Sydney Mokel, CSSH ‘19, have won a 2018 Summer Scholars Independent Research Fellowship (SSIRF). The SSIRF, writes the Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, is Northeastern’s “most robust award for students taking on research and creative projects requiring the greatest degree of independence and sophistication.” The duo’s proposal, entitled Good, Bad, and Ugly: Facilitating Acceptance of Produce Abnormalities for a More Efficient Food System, aims to explore campaigns to normalize “ugly” produce as one component of a larger solution to reduce food waste. “There’s a misconception that ugly produce isn’t healthy, tasty, or safe to eat, but when we’re talking about cosmetic imperfections, that’s just not true,” Bourque said. “Often this produce won’t even make it to store shelves because it’s a little crooked, a little small, or a little lumpy. If we could just get past its unusual appearance, we could make a big dent in the amount of food the U.S. wastes each year.”

According to a new study from University of Georgia researchers, an estimated 111 million tons of displaced plastic waste will pile up across developed nations by 2030 due to a ban on the export of most plastic waste to China. The country welcomed plastic waste from other nations for decades, turning “trash to gold” by recycling the scrap into salable goods. Over a period of 26 years, China accepted 45% of the world’s total recyclables, and, in 2016 alone, 14.1 million metric tons of plastic was shipped to China from other developed nations for this process. Last July, China informed the World Trade Organization that it would no longer import certain types of recyclable used products, citing pollution caused from large plastic-processing plants as a major reason. Additionally, China determined that much of the imported trash in recent years has been single-use plastics - plastic bags, bubble wrap, bottles - which are both low in value and quality when reproduced.

I had the privilege this past Saturday of attending the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) Field Day alongside Global Resilience Institute (GRI) Chief Technology Officer, Mark Patterson. The ARRL Field Day is widely considered to be the largest and most popular on-the-air event for amateur radio operators in North America, held annually on the fourth weekend of June. On one hand, the event is a contest, the object being to contact as many other ham operators as possible in suboptimal conditions. On the other hand, the event serves as a massive civil defense exercise; after all, ham radio operators are often relied upon for critical communications when other networks are disrupted during disasters. Mark and I were at Field Day to interview some ham operators about what motivates them to participate in such events, as well as their motivations for assisting in real-life emergencies. The purpose of conducting these interviews was to gain a better understanding of the ways in which a game-based emergency simulation model provides added incentives for participation. We hope to soon have a smartphone app that will leverage the peer-to-peer technology built into most devices such that when the cellular network is disrupted, phones themselves can form an ad-hoc network that can be used for emergency communication. In order to build and perfect this app, we will need to find a way to somehow compel thousands of people to not only use it, but to use it in a certain way. The ARRL Field Day was a unique opportunity for us to study a gamified emergency communications network in action and begin thinking of ways to approach this challenge ourselves.

Thousands of people are expected to pour into Canadian, American, and Mexican cities for the 2026 World Cup—and Boston could be one of them. The security, transportation, and energy infrastructure in each host city will need to achieve peak performance to accommodate the influx, athletes, fans, and journalists. But are these critical systems up to the test? Two doctoral students at Northeastern have developed a tool that could help assess each city’s level of preparedness. Maria Robson and Lizzy Warner, who work at the university’s Global Resilience Institute, have created an interactive map that illustrates how critical infrastructure in Boston—including the MBTA, the energy grid, and the water and sewer system—are connected to each other. Their map knits together existing charts for each system to provide a comprehensive understanding of how they work together.

In my last post, we explored the story of the small farming town of Murdo, South Dakota after the closure of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad. By establishing the 1880 Town, an attraction providing a glimpse into Murdo's railroad heyday, the town was able to provide a means of survival. However, Murdo's survival past the closure of its railroad lifeline is not entirely unique, nor is the means by which they did so. Whereas Murdo mainly relied on the railroad to connect it to the rest of the world, some towns built their entire economy around the railroad, making the task of survival more difficult. Despite the odds, Booneville, located in Western Arkansas, is one example of a town that did, despite their previous dependence.

Since April 19, two thousand children have been forcibly removed from their parents by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents. The agents are acting on a new policy directive by the Trump administration, which has ordered “zero tolerance,” prosecuting all people who cross the border into the U.S. illegally. Scientists say that the policy will create long-lasting damage for those families affected. There are also immediate consequences, which manifest as physical symptoms of stress, as children experience elevated heart rates and increased production of stress hormones. These hormones undermine the brain's ability to transmit messages, eventually altering or destroying brain neurons entirely. These physical and psychological effects would be severely detrimental to anyone, but to children, they are simply "catastrophic," as Charles Nelson of Harvard Medical School told the Washington Post. Countless studies have already proven the long-term harm of these separations, leaving much of the medical community alarmed at the effects of the Trump administration's new "zero tolerance" rule. Organizations representing more than 250,000 doctors have spoken against the policy.

Gil Kerlikowske, former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Global Resilience Institute, spoke with PBS NewsHour about migrant families being separated at the southern U.S. border. According to the Department of Homeland Security, 2,342 children have been separated from their parents since early May, as part of a new immigration strategy. "It's heartbreaking not only to tear these children away from their mothers and fathers but I am very concerned about the affect that it would have on these border patrol agents," Kerlikowske told PBS NewsHour's John Yang.

The National Weather Service (NWS) has confirmed that a tornado hit Pennsylvania's Wilkes-Barre Township on Wednesday night. This type of storm is unusual for the area. "A severe thunderstorm moved across Luzerne County between 9:30 and 10:30 pm on Wednesday June 13 2018, producing an EF2 tornado in Wilkes-Barre Township around 10:00 pm," The NWS wrote in a bulletin. "The tornado touched down near Mundy Street and Highland Park Boulevard by the Wyoming Valley Mall and traveled about a half mile southeast toward I-81 before dissipating. Numerous roofs were destroyed and windows blown out. Structures were sheared off near their foundation. Power poles were snapped with numerous lines down." The storm mainly damaged stores and restaurants in the township's 'business district'. Reports described "gutted" homes and businesses, flipped vehicles, and left debris throughout the area. Six people with minor injuries were reported by Thursday. However, this was likely the result of lucky timing; if the storm had hit a few hours earlier, the damaged area would have been heavily populated.

Cyber attacks on civilians are becoming increasingly common in our ultra-connected world. There is also a looming threat of cyber-based incidents infringing on physical infrastructure, causing even more tangible damage. As a result, these types of attacks are being weaponized by nations and the increasing gravity of these attacks continues to blur the lines between war, peacetime and diplomacy. A coordinated attack known as "Stuxnet" is perhaps one of the most notable examples of this phenomenon. As part of a joint project between Israel and the United States, multiple iterations of the virus sought to disrupt the nuclear armament process of Iran. The program is famously estimated to have set back the Iranian nuclear program by two years after damaging equipment without detection and frustrating engineers. The idea behind this was, had a nuclear deal with Iran fallen through, the allies would have options to avoid full-on warfare.

Resilient World, a new podcast from the Adrienne Arsht Center for Resilience at the Atlantic Council, launched on Wednesday. Season One features thought leaders sharing their views on resilience and how it can help with disruptions and challenges, from global health security to climate change, countering violent extremism, and many more. Every other Wednesday, Resilient World talks to thought leaders in fields as diverse as national security, science fiction, and public health to highlight innovative ideas about how to prepare for, manage through and bounce back from adversity – in other words, how to make our society more resilient.

Northeastern University Associate Professor and GRI Faculty Affiliate Dr. Özlem Ergun has been appointed to a committee tasked with capturing key lessons and observations around supply and distribution networks under strain during Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. The FEMA-sponsored committee, established by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and the Chair of Policy and Global Affairs (PGA), will address questions such as: What was the state and knowledge of the pre-incident networks and capacity of critical supply chains, distribution systems, and infrastructure? How were these systems impacted by the storms and how did subsequent response actions produce further effects on network integrity and operations? What are the network structures, linkages, and/or behavior most susceptible to effective intervention? How can supply chain systems be strengthened in the short term to be efficient in day-to-day operations and adaptable to sustain integrated disaster and humanitarian supply chain operations during catastrophic events?