Coupled Cascades to Coupled Resilience

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Researchers in energy system modeling and socio-technical transitions can adopt the coupled cascades framework for resilience analysis.

🏢実務担当者:Energy infrastructure operators and planners can use insights on the role of public trust and social capacity in resilience strategies.

🏛政策担当者:Policymakers can consider the explicit trade-offs between efficiency, security, equity, and justice when designing energy resilience policies.

Renewable energy infrastructure is typically assessed through costs, technical performance, and physical robustness, while societal responses to infrastructure disruptions are treated as secondary consequences rather than integral determinants of resilience. The CoupledCascades (CC) project challenges this assumption by arguing that energy system resilience emerges from the interaction of physical and social capacities. When energy infrastructure is disrupted, cascading effects unfold across two interconnected networks. The first is the physical-technical network of energy generation, transmission, and distribution assets. The second is the social network of public trust, risk perception, institutional legitimacy, responsibility attribution, and willingness to cooperate. These networks continuously influence one another while operating within a shared information ecosystem, where mis- and disinformation can amplify the impact of disruptions by eroding trust and coordination. Our central, testable proposition is that a system with strong technical redundancy, but weak social trust may fail more severely than one with fewer technical safeguards but stronger societal resilience. Understanding these coupled dynamics is therefore essential for assessing the coupled resilience of critical energy infrastructure. To address this challenge, we will develop a Coupled Cascades Framework (CCF) for the Norwegian energy-security context, integrating selected energy system variables with societal resilience parameters. The framework enables bidirectional exchange between physical-technical and social models, treating social processes as active components of energy system behaviour/operation. Methodologically, CC combines high-resolution energy system modelling, agent-based societal-response modelling, laboratory experiments on stress responses to energy disruptions, and participatory engagement with communities and stakeholders. The project will deliver: (1) a conceptual model of interacting physical and social cascades; (2) a transferable framework coupling energy system and societal-response models; and (3) empirical evidence on interventions and preparedness strategies, making resilience trade-offs between efficiency, security, equity, and justice explicit.

• openalex https://osf.io/bmgj9first seen 2026-07-29 04:48:27