CAPABLE: Assessing Community Capability Based Resilience

Ireland’s capabilities in crisis prediction and response have been tested in previous disruptive events and will be tested in the future. The snowstorm in 2019, for example, showed that there is still a long way to go to achieve effective and rapid solutions to sudden shocks in the infrastructure systems.

Climate change, cyber-attacks, and pandemics are expected to induce extreme events that put the critical infrastructure systems of Ireland to the test, creating risky situations for its population.

People affected by these events become highly vulnerable, not only during and right after them, but frequently suffering their impacts over longer periods of time. Hence, people should be at the centre of resilience assessment for infrastructure systems, with the latter adopting a proactive role in facilitating the development of resilient societies, that work for the people.

The CAPABLE project proposes a digital solution to offer evidence-informed advice to respond to unforeseen challenges, to anticipate different futures and improve crisis prediction and response. Its idea is that stakeholders should have access to a single platform based on enhanced data, analytics and insights that will combine multiple data sources / prediction models to create a practical tool in case of disruption; and that this platform should be easily adopted by them. The CAPABLE solution will be based on two main pillars: (a) leveraging data and digital technologies to address crisis response capabilities in Ireland and (b) resilience framework integration to provide objective key performance indicators that can drive an effective prioritisation of measures.

The CAPABLE Project’s approach to enhance resilience will use a capability-based assessment of the community functionality in disruptions. This will put the citizens at the centre of the solutions, adopting a people-centred approach. Capability-based approaches are founded on the idea that there is a social welfare role in the fulfilment of the community’s well-being, that there is a “capability to function, i.e., what a person can do or can be” rather than the assumption that there is an equal potential of fulfilment in the society, and CAPABLE argues that infrastructure systems play a key role in this. The CAPABLE project will then leverage the role of infrastructure systems to enable a more resilient society.