Shocks and Stressors
Understanding your shocks, stressors, and the interactions between them is a foundational step for building resilience. Both shocks and stressors can have significant impacts and far-reaching consequences. Additionally, stressors can amplify the impact of shocks and reduce the quality of life across the community.
Shocks are short-duration, rapid-onset or acute events that disrupt normal life.
Examples include:
- Hurricanes
- Floods
- Wildfires
- Earthquakes
- Adversarial cyber and/or physical attacks
- Infrastructure and supply chain disruptions
- Sudden closures of key industries or employers (e.g., healthcare facilities, military bases, mines, power plants)
Stressors are chronic, slow-onset or longer-term conditions that weaken a community over time, worsen the impacts of shocks, and negatively affect community functions and well-being.
Examples include:
- Declining education systems
- Declining industries and economic opportunities
- Deteriorating infrastructure
- Diminishing social capital
- Drought
- Endemic crime
- Food insecurity
- Environmental degradation and contamination
- Lack of quality affordable housing
- Persistent poverty
Shocks and Stressors vs Threats and Hazards
The terms shock and stressor are commonly used in the field of resilience. Other related fields often use the terms threat and hazard. These four terms are related but look at things from different angles. Shocks and stressors are distinguished primarily by duration, while threats and hazards are distinguished primarily by intentionality.
Threats include capabilities, intentions, and attack methods of adversaries used to exploit circumstances or occurrences with the intent to cause harm. A threat is directed at an entity, asset, system, network, or geographic area.
Hazards are a source of actual or potential harm or difficulty. Unlike threats, a hazard is not directed.
Resilience Principles
The following seven principles set the foundation for creating a more resilient nation:
Systems That Contribute to Resilience
Many interconnected systems support communities. It is important for communities to consider the role of these systems and the risks they face from both shocks and stressors as part of their resilience efforts. In order to develop effective resilience solutions, it is essential that communities understand the interconnectedness of these systems and how they depend on each other to function well.
Below are six systems, with example organizations in each system, that have particularly strong connections to the health, safety, well-being, and prosperity of communities and a significant impact on resilience.
Since each system includes individual parts that work together and that also interact with parts of other systems, strengthening resilience requires applying systems thinking-the ability to understand these interconnections to achieve a desired purpose. This means looking at the complex world relationally and as a whole rather than just looking at its individual parts. Applying the resilience principles as part of thinking from a systems perspective will help ensure a holistic approach to resilience.
Systems thinking can support more effective resilience-building in several ways. For example, it can:
- Help us better see the big picture to understand what is working, what unintended negative consequences current systems are producing, and what needs to change.
- Support identification of the root causes of complex problems and uncover the unintended consequences of well-meant proposals.
- Encourage diverse stakeholders to partner to find effective integrated solutions that strengthen systems and benefit all parties.
- Promote longer-term planning that uses limited resources more efficiently.