Resilience, Sustainability and Risk Management: A Focus on Energy

The natural and subsequent human disasters of March 11, 2011 in Japan have brought into focus more than ever the importance of resilience and risk mitigation in the construction of energy infrastructure. This article introduces some of the critical issues and discusses the implications of energy in alleviating or exacerbating the risks of natural disasters. Additionally, it presents a framework for considering the risks of energy systems from a broad perspective. The connection is drawn between design for sustainability and the risks associated with energy systems in natural disasters. As a result of the assessment, six criteria are proposed for energy systems to contribute to societal resilience in the face of natural disasters—they should be: (1) Continuous; (2) Robust; (3) Independent; (4) Controllable; (5) Non-hazardous; and (6) Matched to demand.