Labaka-Zubieta, L. (Leire)
- Publications
- item.page.relationships.isContributorAdvisorOfPublication
- item.page.relationships.isContributorOfPublication
12 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 12
- Towards a resilient community: A decision support framework for prioritizing stakeholders' interaction areas(Elsevier, 2023) Elkady, S.K. (Sahar Khaled); Hernantes-Apezetxea, J. (Josune); Labaka-Zubieta, L. (Leire)Interactions among community stakeholders act as a buffer against disasters and present a way to build community resilience. Several decision support frameworks have been proposed in the literature to improve community resilience, but none focus on interactions among stakeholders. This paper presents a decision support framework to guide decision-makers in prioritizing areas of interaction based on their mutual impact. The framework is built on three components. The first involved conducting a literature review to identify areas of interaction among community stakeholders; resulting in identifying 27 factors that reflect the various interaction areas. The second was to implement a Delphi study to capture the dependency among the different areas. The third was to prioritize the identified areas of interaction through network analysis techniques to understand the propagating impacts of a change in one area on the others. The framework was applied to Spain, utilizing data provided by Spanish resilience experts. Our findings indicate a high degree of interdependence among all areas of interaction. Decentralization of the decision-making process and effective leading capabilities of emergency organizations have been identified as top priority areas. By utilizing this framework, decision-makers can systematically enhance interactions among diverse stakeholders, creating a roadmap to improve community resilience.
- Cyber Resilience Progression Model(2020) Carías-Alvarez, J.F. (Juan Francisco); Hernantes-Apezetxea, J. (Josune); Labaka-Zubieta, L. (Leire); Arrizabalaga-Juaristi, S. (Saioa)Due to the hazardous current cyber environment, cyber resilience is more necessary than ever. Companies are exposed to an often-ignored risk of suffering a cyber incident. This places cyber incidents as one of the main risks for companies in the past few years. On the other hand, the literature meant to aid on the operationalization of cyber resilience is mostly focused on listing the policies required to operationalize it, but is often lacking on how to prioritize these actions and how to strategize their implementation. Therefore, the usage of the current literature in this state is not optimal for companies. Thus, this study proposes a progression model to help companies strategize and prioritize cyber resilience policies by proposing the natural evolution of the policies over time. To develop the model, this study used semi-structured interviews and an analysis of the data obtained from the interviews. Through this methodology, this study found the starting points for each cyber resilience policy and their natural progression over time. These results can help companies in their cyber resilience building process by giving them insights on how to strategize the implementation of the cyber resilience policies.
- Towards resilient cities: A maturity model for operationalizing resilience(Elsevier BV, 2019) Raquel; Maraña-Casado, P.(Patricia); Hernantes-Apezetxea, J. (Josune); Sarriegi, J.M. (José María); Labaka-Zubieta, L. (Leire)A growing majority of the world's population lives in cities. This rapid urbanization increases the concentration of people and critical services in cities, which also upscale their exposure to acute shocks and long-term stresses such as floods, earthquakes, climate change or social dynamics. While all of these challenges are complex in themselves, in most cases, cities must face a combination of them. Resilience thinking demands cities plan holistically so that they are prepared for whatever shocks and stresses may arise. Although there is a set of frameworks aimed at building city resilience, frameworks specifically aimed at operationalizing the resilience-building process within cities remain undeveloped. This research begins to fill this gap by developing a Resilience Maturity Model (RMM) that provides cities with a roadmap for operationalizing the resilience-building process. For that purpose, the RMM defines a sequence of maturity stages and a set of policies that help cities to assess their current maturity stage and identify the policies that need to be implemented to improve their resilience level.
- Guide for climate-resilient cities: An urban critical infrastructures approach(MDPI AG, 2019) Hernantes-Apezetxea, J. (Josune); Labaka-Zubieta, L. (Leire); Lomba-Fernández, C. (Cinta)Climate change (CC) is one of the most challenging issues ever faced, as it affects every system worldwide at any scale. Urban areas are not an exception. Extreme weather-related events have seriously affected urban areas in recent years, and they have a significant impact on the welfare of people. According to UN projections, by 2050 more than 68% of the world’s population could be concentrated in urban areas. Additionally, daily life in urban areas is highly dependent on certain critical services and products provided by critical infrastructures (CIs). Therefore, it is especially relevant to understand how CC affects urban CIs in order to develop mechanisms to improve their capacity to handle crises derived from CC. In this context, resilience-based strategies provide a holistic approach, considering both predictable and unpredictable threats. This paper proposes a guide for assessing and enhancing the resilience level of cities against CC, considering urban CIs as key agents in improving the city’s capacity to face and recover from CC-related crises. The guide was developed through a co-creation process in which two cities in the Basque Country (Spain) worked together with CI providers and other relevant stakeholders in the resilience-building process. The resulting guide is to be used by city stakeholders at a strategic level, providing them with: (1) a qualitative assessment of the city’s current resilience level in the CC context; (2) better knowledge about urban CI sectors, their interdependency relationships and the chain of impacts due to cascading effects in the short, medium and in the long term and; (3) a set of policies that enhance city resilience.
- What do emergency services and authorities need from society to better handle disasters?(Elsevier, 2022) Elkady, S.K. (Sahar Khaled); Hernantes-Apezetxea, J. (Josune); Muñoz, M. (Mar); Labaka-Zubieta, L. (Leire)Over the last 20 years, disaster events have been increasing with 3.25 billion people affected. The public are not only affected by these incidents but also, they are the first on the disaster scene. To fully utilize the public’s potential and define their role in assisting in disaster management, we need to hear the voice of the main responsible for handling a disaster, the authorities, and emergency personnel. Therefore, this paper aims to identify and prioritize their needs through conducting a survey and interviews with members of authorities and emergency organizations in several European Union countries, namely; France, Israel, Italy, Norway, Romania, Spain, and Sweden. The highest-ranked needs identified are getting credible information as soon as possible from the disaster scene as well as following authorities’ recommendations. Additionally, this study identifies some barriers associated with the engagement of society in disaster management. An example of such a barrier is that citizens could hurt themselves or others and hamper the intervention efforts through their interference. Despite the barriers, the emergency organizations are in favor of engaging the society in the response and recovery phases. The identified needs and barriers help to define procedures and policies that can improve the engagement of citizens and consequently, social resilience.
- Coming to Action: operationalizing city resilience(MDPI AG, 2019) Iturriza, M. (Marta); Hernantes-Apezetxea, J. (Josune); Labaka-Zubieta, L. (Leire)There is an urgent need to build city resilience in order to face upcoming foreseen and unforeseen disasters more holistically, economically and collaboratively. Population trends mean that people are moving to urban areas and the traditional approach to crisis management is becoming obsolete as it is no longer able to deal with the new challenges that are emerging such as social dynamics or climate change. In this context, there are numerous studies and strategies that define how to build city resilience and consequently sustainable cities. However, decision-makers have trouble putting the knowledge in the studies and strategies into practice, as they find this information to be too abstract or far from their daily activities. More practical tools are needed to facilitate the operationalization of city resilience and familiarize decision makers with the concept. To that end, this paper presents both a qualitative and quantitative toolkit that enables decision makers to study, understand and train themselves to operationalize city resilience properly. This toolkit is composed of two complementary tools, namely the Resilience Maturity Model (RMM) and a serious game called City Resilience Dynamics (CRD). The paper also discusses the key points that led to a useful, trustworthy and flexible toolkit that decision-makers can use in building city resilience.
- Revealing resilience features: Analyzing informal solutions adopted in emergency situations(Elsevier, 2024) Elkady, S.K. (Sahar Khaled); Hernantes-Apezetxea, J. (Josune); Gómez., E. (Eulalia); Labaka-Zubieta, L. (Leire)Emergency organizations have pre-established plans and procedures to handle disaster situations, but these formal solutions may not always work due to the unpredictable and complex nature of disasters. In such cases, emergency personnel improvise and adapt to new situations, adopting informal disaster response mechanisms/actions without being certain of their effectiveness. Therefore, beyond plans and procedures (formal solutions) it is crucial to prepare and train emergency responders by strengthening their improvisation and adaptation skills to implement informal solutions when unexpected situations arise. This paper aims to analyze how knowledge gained from implementing informal solutions can be used to enhance planning and preparedness for future events. To do so, semi-structured interviews with emergency experts from emergency organizations and authorities, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and the private sector were conducted. As a result, this paper first identifies four critical factors that contribute to the adoption and implementation of informal solutions in emergency response: uncertainty, legal framework, stakeholders, and bureaucratic delay. Secondly, this paper proposes a formalization framework to better leverage the benefits of informal solutions for emergency preparedness. The framework consists of three components: 1) Informality drivers that push toward the emergence of informal solutions, 2) Formalization enablers that facilitate the formalization process, and 3) formalization barriers that impede the transformation of informal into formal solutions.
- Are cities aware enough? A framework for developing city awareness to climate change(MDPI, 2020) Iturriza, M. (Marta); Hernantes-Apezetxea, J. (Josune); Labaka-Zubieta, L. (Leire); Abdelgawad, A.A. (Ahmed A.)Cities are growing and becoming more complex, and as they continue to do so, their capacity to deal with foreseen and unforeseen challenges derived from climate change has to adapt accordingly. In the last decade, an effort has been made to build city resilience and improve cities’ capacity to respond to, recover from and adapt to climate change. However, certain city stakeholders’ lack of proactive behavior has resulted in less effective city resilience-building strategies. In this sense, the importance of developing stakeholders’ awareness of climate change in order to ensure proactivity is documented in the literature. However, there is a lack of studies that define how, when and what should be done to develop stakeholders’ climate change awareness at a city scale. This paper presents a framework to develop stakeholders climate change awareness as a result of a systematic literature review and a co-creation process with the participation of 47 experts through a focus group and a Delphi study. The framework defines a four-step process and includes nine policies that seek to develop stakeholders’ climate change awareness. The framework concludes determining the responsibilities of each stakeholder by defining the policies they should implement, and the effect one policy might cause on other stakeholders and among policies.
- Decision-making for community resilience: A review of decision support systems and their applications(Elsevier, 2024) Elkady, S.K. (Sahar Khaled); Hernantes-Apezetxea, J. (Josune); Labaka-Zubieta, L. (Leire)Decision Support Systems (DSS) have emerged as important tools for enhancing community resilience due to their ability to provide timely and efficient solutions to disaster-related problems while reflecting the perspectives of different stakeholders and utilizing multiple data sources. This paper provides a comprehensive summary of DSS applications to community resilience, emphasizing how the different modeling techniques are used in different disaster phases. We found that optimization techniques are the most frequently used methods for building DSS. Furthermore, we found that DSS tend to focus more on the preparedness and response phases of disaster management, rather than the recovery and mitigation phases. Moreover, the study highlights the main challenges in developing and implementing DSS for resilience, such as data availability, the uncertainty of the disaster context, and the need for cross-disciplinary collaboration. Based on the reviewed papers, we provide some guidelines to practitioners to select the most suitable decision-support tools for the needs of their community. The study aims to help decision-makers and researchers build effective decision support systems for enhancing community resilience, considering the current challenges.
- A framework for public-private-people partnerships in the city resilience-building process(Elsevier BV, 2018) Maraña-Casado, P.(Patricia); Sarriegi, J.M. (José María); Labaka-Zubieta, L. (Leire)Citizens living in cities where public entities are committed to the development of city resilience are increasingly aware that the entire responsibility for preventing, responding to and recovering from crises cannot fully fall on public entities and private companies. In fact, citizens are more and more required to prepare for, respond to and recover from crises. To that end, there is an emerging need to involve not only public entities and private companies but also citizens in the process of building a city’s resilience in order to understand the different perspectives on the same reality. This research paper is based on a systematic literature review to develop a framework that defines and describes the successful characteristics of public-private-people partnerships (4Ps) in the city resilience-building process. The framework revolves around two criteria for classification: the dimension of the characteristics (stakeholder relationship, information flow and conflict resolution), and the attributes of the partnership. A preliminary list of relationships among the characteristics found in the literature is also presented. The aim throughout is to define which characteristics need to be developed in order to better ensure successful cooperation among the three main stakeholders: public entities, private companies and citizens.