Population migration has exceeded 200 million per year worldwide for each of the past two years. The state of civil infrastructure at the points of origin of migrants is a key factor in mass displacements of people. Understanding the experiences of migrants and other vulnerable populations in disasters is of course essential to infrastructure resilience. Yet such understanding is sorely lacking as a basis for, e.g., resource allocation, recovery schedule, and setting of priorities on various time scales. A critical need in practice is avoidance of excess additional displacements of the most vulnerable populations.
We present a review of literature and associated framework for assessing the maturity of current approaches to understanding and influencing population migration as it relates to infrastructure resilience. We use recent literature on recovery and resilience including Cimellaro et al. [Journal of Structural Engineering, 142.10 (2016)] to extend the framework of Fussell [American Behavioral Scientist, 59(10), 1231-1245, (2015)], establishing entry points for population displacement considerations in infrastructure interdependency models.
With respect to socially vulnerably populations, we propose evaluating infrastructure interdependency models along the following dimensions:
- Recovery prioritization metrics
- Relevant time factors (windows, time steps, duration, latencies, seasonality, day of week, time of day)
- Spatial aspects of recovery
- Use and handling of agents
- Role of policy (e.g., pre-disaster and recovery planning)
- Resource constraints
We analyze several recent models of historical situations and suggest opportunities to improve existing approaches or inform the development of new approaches. This framework is most applicable to cases where conflict is not a contributing disturbance.
The results will be presented as case studies along with a mapping of migration, displacement and immobility considerations onto civil infrastructure systems. The latter will be available in in tabular format alongside a data resource list to inform the art and practice of emergency management, risk communication, risk governance, and social and environmental justice.