Citation:

Frank, J., K. Naney, L. Tran, T. Barzyk, AND Betsy Smith. Using Systems Thinking, Stakeholder Engagement, and Multicriteria Decision Analysis to Promote Resilient Decision-Making in Seaport Communities [GRS 12/05/18]. The Global Resilience Summit, New Orleans, LA, December 04 - 06, 2018.

Impact/Purpose:

For presentation at the Global Resilience Summit, December 2018.

Description:

Seaports are a nexus for multi-modal movement of goods where economic, social, and environmental resiliency and management goals converge. Environmental hazards and associated exposure risks can develop when practitioners make decisions that optimize goals in isolation, without adequately considering cross-sector impacts, or without integrating stakeholder perspectives into the decision-making process. Due to the complex interactions among human systems, and the built and natural environment, decision-makers are presented with unique challenges that require a systems perspective, multidisciplinary expertise, and multi-sector stakeholder collaboration to effectively prevent or reduce environmental hazards. Our research demonstrates strategies to engage multidisciplinary experts and decision-makers in a systems analysis to evaluate how alternative decision scenarios for seaport management may interact across sectors and contribute to exposure risk and resiliency for the associated port community. Multidisciplinary expert engagement was used to create system maps, and to rank decision variables under multiple goals to identify dominant factors that contribute to resiliency. This presentation will discuss systems thinking frameworks, best practices and strategies identified for systems mapping, and illustrate how expert-informed systems maps can be integrated into decision-making to identify key factors that drive changes in resiliency when data or resources are limited, or for systems that are strongly driven by social or qualitative factors.

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