Drake E. Warren

A Framework for Assessing the Resilience of Infrastructure and Economic Systems

Recent U.S. national mandates are shifting the country’s homeland security policy from one of asset-level critical infrastructure protection (CIP) to allhazards critical infrastructure resilience, creating the need for a unifying framework for assessing the resilience of critical infrastructure systems and the economies that rely on them. Resilience has been defined and applied in many disciplines; consequently, many disparate approaches exist. We propose a general framework for assessing the resilience of infrastructure and economic systems. The framework consists of three primary components: (1) a definition of resilience that is specific to infrastructure systems; (2) a quantitative model for measuring the resilience of systems to disruptive events through the evaluation of both impacts to system performance and the cost of recovery; and (3) a qualitative method for assessing the system properties that inherently determine system resilience, providing insight and direction for potential improvements in these systems.

A resilience assessment framework for infrastructure and economic systems: Quantitative and qualitative resilience analysis of petrochemical supply chains to a hurricane

In recent years, the nation has recognized that critical infrastructure protection should consider not only the prevention of disruptive events but also the processes that infrastructure systems undergo to maintain functionality following disruptions. This more comprehensive approach has been termed critical infrastructure resilience. Given the occurrence of a particular disruptive event, the resilience of a system to that event is the systems ability to reduce efficiently both the magnitude and duration of the deviation from targeted system performance levels. Under the direction of the U. S. Department of Homeland Securitys Science and Technology Directorate, Sandia National Laboratories has developed a comprehensive resilience assessment framework for evaluating the resilience of infrastructure and economic systems. The framework includes a quantitative methodology that measures resilience costs that result from a disruption to infrastructure function. The framework also includes a qualitative analysis methodology that assesses system characteristics affecting resilience to provide insight and direction for potential improvements. This article describes the resilience assessment framework and demonstrates the utility of the assessment framework through application to two hypothetical scenarios involving the disruption of a petrochemical supply chain by hurricanes.

Why some rural places prosper and others do not

More than 300 rural counties are more prosperous than the nation. Each has lower unemployment rates, lower poverty rates, lower school dropout rates, and better housing conditions than the nation. Prosperous counties tend to have more educated populations, more diverse economies, more private non-farm jobs, more farmers and government farm payments, more creative class occupations, and more equal income distributions. They have fewer African-American, American Indian, or Hispanic residents and fewer recent immigrants. Some findings support what many rural people believe to be true: civically engaged religious groups and other identities that bind people together can really matter. Other results contradict conventional wisdom. For instance, climate and distances to cities and major airports, are relatively unimportant. Focusing on prosperity, instead of growth or competitiveness, provides new insights into rural conditions and prospects.

Economics definitions, methods, models, and analysis procedures for Homeland Security applications.

This report gives an overview of the types of economic methodologies and models used by Sandia economists in their consequence analysis work for the National Infrastructure Simulation&Analysis Center and other DHS programs. It describes the three primary resolutions at which analysis is conducted (microeconomic, mesoeconomic, and macroeconomic), the tools used at these three levels (from data analysis to internally developed and publicly available tools), and how they are used individually and in concert with each other and other infrastructure tools.

Estimates of the long-term U.S. economic impacts of global climate change-induced drought.

While climate-change models have done a reasonable job of forecasting changes in global climate conditions over the past decades, recent data indicate that actual climate change may be much more severe. To better understand some of the potential economic impacts of these severe climate changes, Sandia economists estimated the impacts to the U.S. economy of climate change-induced impacts to U.S. precipitation over the 2010 to 2050 time period. The economists developed an impact methodology that converts changes in precipitation and water availability to changes in economic activity, and conducted simulations of economic impacts using a large-scale macroeconomic model of the U.S. economy.

Executive Summary for Assessing the Near-Term Risk of Climate Uncertainty: Interdependencies among the U.S. States

Policy makers will most likely need to make decisions about climate policy before climate scientists have resolved all relevant uncertainties about the impacts of climate change. This study demonstrates a risk-assessment methodology for evaluating uncertain future climatic conditions. We estimate the impacts of climate change on U.S. state- and national-level economic activity from 2010 to 2050. To understand the implications of uncertainty on risk and to provide a near-term rationale for policy interventions to mitigate the course of climate change, we focus on precipitation, one of the most uncertain aspects of future climate change. We use results of the climate-model ensemble from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report 4 (AR4) as a proxy for representing climate uncertainty over the next 40 years, map the simulated weather from the climate models hydrologically to the county level to determine the physical consequences on economic activity at the state level, and perform a detailed 70-industry analysis of economic impacts among the interacting lower-48 states. We determine the industry-level contribution to the gross domestic product and employment impacts at the state level, as well as interstate population migration, effects on personal income, and consequences for the U.S. trade balance. We show that the mean or average risk of damage to the U.S. economy from climate change, at the national level, is on the order of

Critical Infrastructure System Security and Resiliency

1 trillion over the next 40 years, with losses in employment equivalent to nearly 7 million full-time jobs.