How some types of risk assessments can support resilience analysis and management

•The paper discusses the relationship between resilience and risk.•Quantitative resilience metrics should be supplemented by qualitative knowledge judgements.•The assessment of resilience can be improved by considering risk.•The resilience management can be improved by considering risk.•These considerations are qualitative assessments highlighting uncertainties and knowledge.

Resilience has become an important concept in safety and risk research and applications. There are many definitions, but the fundamental idea is that resilience has to do with the ability of a system to sustain or restore its functionality and performance following a change in the condition of the system (referred to as an event). Describing or measuring the degree of resilience is challenging as it is not obvious what events should be considered; also unknown types of events occurring need to be taken into account. Considerable efforts have been made to understand and describe the resilience concept and its relationship to risk, and the purpose of the present paper is to contribute to this work by arguing that to analyse and manage resilience, risk considerations and assessments can provide useful input. Resilience management is not depending on risk considerations and assessments to be effective, but could benefit from such considerations and assessments if properly conducted. They need to extend beyond traditional quantitative risk assessments; broader qualitative or semi-quantitative risk considerations and assessments are needed which highlight uncertainties and the knowledge and strength of knowledge that the uncertainty judgments are based on.