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Research article

What are cascading disasters?

Authors
  • David Alexander (University College London, London, UK)
  • Gianluca Pescaroli orcid logo (University College London, London, UK)

This is version 2 of this article, the published version can be found at: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444/ucloe.000003

Abstract

Cascades have emerged as a new paradigm in disaster studies. The high level of dependency of modern populations on critical infrastructure and networks allows the impact of disasters to propagate through socio-economic systems. Where vulnerabilities overlap and interact, escalation points are created that can create secondary effects with greater impact than the primary event. This article explains how complexity can be categorised and analysed in order to find those weak points in society that enable cascading impacts to develop. Scenarios can be used to identify critical dependencies and guide measures designed to increase resilience. Experience suggests that many potential impacts of cascading disasters remain uninvestigated, which provides ample scope for escalation of impacts into complex forms of crisis.

Keywords: built environment, cascading disasters, cascading effects, interdependencies, critical infrastructure, complex systems, scenarios, the environment, policy and law

Rights: © 2019 The Authors.

6817 Views

11Citations

Published on
08 Aug 2019
Peer Reviewed
License
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

 Open peer review from Yasemin Didem Aktas

Review

Review information

DOI:: 10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-SOCSCI.AY7VBF.v1.RVBFBS
License:
This work has been published open access under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0 , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Conditions, terms of use and publishing policy can be found at www.scienceopen.com .

ScienceOpen disciplines: Earth & Environmental sciences , Engineering , Social & Behavioral Sciences
Keywords: Interdependencies , Scenarios , Critical infrastructure , Built environment , Complex systems , Cascading disasters , Policy and law , The Environment , Cascading effects

Review text

Thank you very much for your revisions, which address all the points previously raised by the reviewers. Please could you kindly revise your references before we proceed with the publication - currently both Pescaroli et al. (2018) and Galbusera et al. (2018) are numbered as 17, and your manuscript doesn't seem to refer to Parisi et al. (2018) (no 24 on your references list). Thanks!



Note:
This review refers to round of peer review and may pertain to an earlier version of the document.

 Open peer review from Yasemin Didem Aktas

Review

Review information

DOI:: 10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-SOCSCI.A4KAQK.v1.ROBXSX
License:
This work has been published open access under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0 , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Conditions, terms of use and publishing policy can be found at www.scienceopen.com .

ScienceOpen disciplines: Earth & Environmental sciences , Engineering , Social & Behavioral Sciences
Keywords: Interdependencies , Scenarios , Critical infrastructure , Built environment , Complex systems , Cascading disasters , Policy and law , The Environment , Cascading effects

Review text

The “What are Cascading Disasters?” is a comprehensive summary of why the disaster risk and resilience research-base and practice need to shift their attention from a single event to interacting, interdependent multi-hazards. The article briefly explains why this paradigm shift is needed and its implications, with a diverse set of examples, and from technical, technological, historical, philosophical and finally political angles. This short piece fully convinces the reader of the importance of the topic, and inspires further reading. It has been a pleasure to read it and I strongly recommend its publication at UCL Environment.

My only quite minor comment regards Figure 1, which I believe was originally used elsewhere: please can the authors explain the paths (a) and (b)? Again, perhaps a rather petty point: Line 115 suggests the manuscript was drafted by a single author, while there are two?



Note:
This review refers to round of peer review and may pertain to an earlier version of the document.

 Open peer review from Giulio Zuccaro

Review

Review information

DOI:: 10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR-SOCSCI.AQXYD0.v1.RQMMYF
License:
This work has been published open access under Creative Commons Attribution License CC BY 4.0 , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Conditions, terms of use and publishing policy can be found at www.scienceopen.com .

ScienceOpen disciplines: Earth & Environmental sciences , Engineering , Social & Behavioral Sciences
Keywords: Interdependencies , Scenarios , Critical infrastructure , Built environment , Complex systems , Cascading disasters , Policy and law , The Environment , Cascading effects

Review text

The paper is very interesting.

It introduces an original treatment of Cascading Disasters.

The general aspects  of the method proposed  for the Cascading disasters evaluation are well described.

The theoretical algorithms description is not reported in the paper.

References to predictive evaluation models of Cascading effetcs would be useful in order to define a complete framework of the topic.



Note:
This review refers to round of peer review and may pertain to an earlier version of the document.