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1. Multiple Dimensions of Resilience: How NEON Supports Ecology and the Research Community in the Face of Compounding Disasters

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2022.653666  

   Robinson, Natalie ; Barnett, David T. ; Jones, Katherine D. ; Stanish, Lee F. ; Parker, Stephanie M. ( March 2022 , Frontiers in Environmental Science)

   Quantifying the resilience of ecological communities to increasingly frequent and severe environmental disturbance, such as natural disasters, requires long-term and continuous observations and a research community that is itself resilient. Investigators must have reliable access to data, a variety of resources to facilitate response to perturbation, and mechanisms for rapid and efficient return to function and/or adaptation to post-disaster conditions. There are always challenges to meeting these requirements, which may be compounded by multiple, co-occurring incidents. For example, travel restrictions resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic hindered preparations for, and responses to, environmental disasters that are the hallmarks of resilient research communities. During its initial years of data collection, a diversity of disturbances—earthquakes, wildfires, droughts, hurricanes and floods—have impacted sites at which the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) intends to measure organisms and environment for at least 30 years. These events strain both the natural and human communities associated with the Observatory, and additional stressors like public health crises only add to the burden. Here, we provide a case-study of how NEON has demonstrated not only internal resilience in the face of the public health crisis of COVID-19, but has also enhanced the resilience of ecological research communities associated with the network and provided crucial information for quantifying the impacts of and responses to disturbance events on natural systems—their ecological resilience. The key components discussed are: 1) NEON’s infrastructure and resources to support its core internal community, to adapt to rapidly changing situations, and to quickly resume operations following disruption, thus enabling the recovery of information flow crucial for data continuity; 2) how NEON data, tools, and materials are foundational in supporting the continuation of research programs in the face of challenges like those of COVID-19, thus enhancing the resilience of the greater ecological research community; and 3) the importance of diverse and consistent data for defining baseline and post-disaster conditions that are required to quantify the effects of natural disasters on ecosystem patterns and processes. 

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2. A Survey on Data-driven COVID-19 and Future Pandemic Management

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3542818  

   Tao, Yudong ; Yang, Chuang ; Wang, Tianyi ; Coltey, Erik ; Jin, Yanxiu ; Liu, Yinghao ; Jiang, Renhe ; Fan, Zipei ; Song, Xuan ; Shibasaki, Ryosuke ; et al ( July 2023 , ACM Computing Surveys)

   The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in more than 440 million confirmed cases globally and almost 6 million reported deaths as of March 2022. Consequently, the world experienced grave repercussions to citizens’ lives, health, wellness, and the economy. In responding to such a disastrous global event, countermeasures are often implemented to slow down and limit the virus’s rapid spread. Meanwhile, disaster recovery, mitigation, and preparation measures have been taken to manage the impacts and losses of the ongoing and future pandemics. Data-driven techniques have been successfully applied to many domains and critical applications in recent years. Due to the highly interdisciplinary nature of pandemic management, researchers have proposed and developed data-driven techniques across various domains. However, a systematic and comprehensive survey of data-driven techniques for pandemic management is still missing. In this article, we review existing data analysis and visualization techniques and their applications for COVID-19 and future pandemic management with respect to four phases (namely, Response, Recovery, Mitigation, and Preparation) in disaster management. Data sources utilized in these studies and specific data acquisition and integration techniques for COVID-19 are also summarized. Furthermore, open issues and future directions for data-driven pandemic management are discussed. 

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3. An applied approach to multi-criteria humanitarian supply chain planning for pandemic response

   https://doi.org/10.1108/JHLSCM-08-2020-0064  

   Malmir, Behnam ; Zobel, Christopher W. ( January 2021 , Journal of Humanitarian Logistics and Supply Chain Management)

   null (Ed.)

   Purpose When a large-scale outbreak such as the COVID-19 pandemic happens, organizations that are responsible for delivering relief may face a lack of both provisions and human resources. Governments are the primary source for the humanitarian supplies required during such a crisis; however, coordination with humanitarian NGOs in handling such pandemics is a vital form of public-private partnership (PPP). Aid organizations have to consider not only the total degree of demand satisfaction in such cases but also the obligation that relief goods such as medicine and foods should be distributed as equitably as possible within the affected areas (AAs). Design/methodology/approach Given the challenges of acquiring real data associated with procuring relief items during the COVID-19 outbreak, a comprehensive simulation-based plan is used to generate 243 small, medium and large-sized problems with uncertain demand, and these problems are solved to optimality using GAMS. Finally, post-optimality analyses are conducted, and some useful managerial insights are presented. Findings The results imply that given a reasonable measure of deprivation costs, it can be important for managers to focus less on the logistical costs of delivering resources and more on the value associated with quickly and effectively reducing the overall suffering of the affected individuals. It is also important for managers to recognize that even though deprivation costs and transportation costs are both increasing as the time horizon increases, the actual growth rate of the deprivation costs decreases over time. Originality/value In this paper, a novel mathematical model is presented to minimize the total costs of delivering humanitarian aid for pandemic relief. With a focus on sustainability of operations, the model incorporates total transportation and delivery costs, the cost of utilizing the transportation fleet (transportation mode cost), and equity and deprivation costs. Taking social costs such as deprivation and equity costs into account, in addition to other important classic cost terms, enables managers to organize the best possible response when such outbreaks happen. 

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4. Uncertainty Analysis of Business Interruption Losses in the Philippines Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic

   https://doi.org/10.3390/economies10080202  

   Santos, Joost R. ; Tapia, John Frederick ; Lamberte, Albert ; Solis, Christine Alyssa ; Tan, Raymond R. ; Aviso, Kathleen B. ; Yu, Krista Danielle ( August 2022 , Economies)

   In this study, we utilize an input–output (I–O) model to perform an ex-post analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic workforce disruptions in the Philippines. Unlike most disasters that debilitate physical infrastructure systems, the impact of disease pandemics like COVID-19 is mostly concentrated on the workforce. Workforce availability was adversely affected by lockdowns as well as by actual illness. The approach in this paper is to use Philippine I–O data for multiple years and generate Dirichlet probability distributions for the Leontief requirements matrix (i.e., the normalized sectoral transactions matrix) to address uncertainties in the parameters. Then, we estimated the workforce dependency ratio based on a literature survey and then computed the resilience index in each economic sector. For example, sectors that depend heavily on the physical presence of their workforce (e.g., construction, agriculture, manufacturing) incur more opportunity losses compared to sectors where workforce can telework (e.g., online retail, education, business process outsourcing). Our study estimated the 50th percentile economic losses in the range of PhP 3.3 trillion (with telework) to PhP 4.8 trillion (without telework), which is consistent with independently published reports. The study provides insights into the direct and indirect economic impacts of workforce disruptions in emerging economies and will contribute to the general domain of disaster risk management. 

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5. Meta-network Framework for Analyzing Disaster Management System-of-Systems

   Fan, Chao ; Zhang, Cheng ; Mostafavi, Ali ( January 2018 , IEEE System of Systems Engineering Conference (SoSE))

   The objective of this paper is to establish a meta-network framework to identify constituents in Disaster Management System-of-Systems (DM-SoS), conceptualize relationships and interactions among the constituents, and formulate quantitative measurements of DM-SoS performance for achieving network-centric operation and coordination in the context of disasters. With increasingly serious impacts of disasters on interdependent and heterogeneous systems, the improvement of effective and integrative disaster response and coordination is needed. However, some existing literature only proposed some frameworks for modeling disaster management systems, while another stream of studies only examined the social network analysis (SNA) for understanding the interactions between stakeholders. Thus, quantitative and integrative measurements in DM-SoS are missing. To address this knowledge gap, the authors created and discussed a metanetwork framework integrating various types of entities and relationships for quantitatively analyzing the performance of DM-SoS. First, this framework defined nodes and links in meta-metrics for abstracting constituents in disaster management. Second, some performance indicators (e.g., effectiveness, the extent of information sharing, and the extent of self-organization) were created to show the capacities of disaster systems, and the potential perturbations in disaster environment were translated by network theory. Finally, we examined the impacts of perturbations on the indicators and assessed the performance by integrating overall indicators. This study highlighted the significance of quantitative measurements and an integrative perspective on analyzing efficiency and effectiveness of disaster response and coordination. The study also provides implications for making comparisons of different response strategies for decision makers to achieve resilient disaster management systems. 

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