Safety in an uncertain world within the Resilience Integrated Model of Climate and Economics (RIMCE)

Abstract

In this work, we propose the concept of safety, which encompasses risk, vulnerability, and resilience, fundamental concepts that are needed to consider when discussing the risks that threaten the communities. We argue that the safety index we propose captures the most relevant issues about resilience, which is at the core of the RIMCE (Resilience Integrated Model of Climate and Economics), developed in the authors’ previous work. We point out that the social resilience tax, proposed in the context of RIMCE, is an instrumental tool for facing the dimension of uncertainty inherent in the ongoing climate crisis we face. We show that resilience implies a direct improvement in safety, reflected by the safety index.

Introduction

Human activities have always impacted the Earth System; however, more recently, they have threatened the planet’s very habitability. Their implications give rise to risks of unprecedented scale. The typology of the impacts ranges from those affecting populations to those affecting ecosystems and biodiversity.

Risk can be assessed by the probability of a generating phenomenon (dangerousness hazard) and by the severity of its impact. The concept of vulnerability is a combined relationship between exposures to risks that have impactful effects in a context, and how dangerous a phenomenon is, which means that the concept of vulnerability is not separable from the concepts of risk and resilience (Gonçalves, 2022). The effects mentioned refer to the consequences resulting from the impact of potentially dangerous events, which can be cumulative, resulting in associated risks, and exponential, when they co-occur. As mentioned in Zscheischler et al. (2018): “Compound events can be embedded in the general risk framework linking hazards, vulnerability and exposure. Changes in exposure and vulnerability, often related to human development, can strongly affect environmental risk.”

Such a statement asks for a reflection and a definition of the contents of the used concepts.

The vulnerability concept, which has different connotations in the literature on disasters, depends on the orientation and perspective of research (Cutter, 1996, 2001; Dow, 1992).

There are three main research directions on vulnerability: (a) an exposure model, referring to the identification of conditions that make people and places vulnerable to extreme natural hazards (Anderson, 2000; Burton et al., 1993); (b) a measure of social resistance or resilience to hazards associated with the assumption that vulnerability is a social condition (Blaikie et al., 1994; Hewitt, 1997); (c) the integration of potential exposures and social resilience with a specific focus in particular places or regions (Cutter et al., 2000, 2010; Kasperson and Kasperson, 1995). This recognition requires revisions and enlargements in the basic design of the vulnerability assessments, including the capacity to treat coupled human-environment systems and those linkages within or without the systems that affect their vulnerability.

Considerable attention has been paid to different components of biophysical and environmental vulnerability (Mileti, 1999) and the vulnerability of the civil infrastructure. However, our current knowledge about social and individual aspects of vulnerability is minimal.

Experts and researchers must develop new approaches and ensure training programs for workers dealing with risk and vulnerability assessments in large cities. Studies have investigated methods to develop vulnerability indicators (Davidson, 1997).

Five main factors—hazard, exposure, vulnerability, context, and emergency response and recovery planning—are measured and combined. The methodology for assessing relative community vulnerability was developed by Granger et al. (1999). This involves indicators that contribute to an overall “relative risk rank.” The indicators are grouped into five categories: setting, society, security, sustenance, and shelter. Within these five themes, the indicators are a collection of physical, structural, economic, and lifestyle factors chosen to measure a community’s vulnerability (Dwyer et al., 2004). Nevertheless, socially generated vulnerabilities are largely ignored and are often described solely by individual features (age, gender, health, income, type of housing, employment). This may be due to the complex nature of people, social structures, and culture, as well as to the multi-disciplinary approach that is required to do such research.

All these activities will help, in the long run, to define assessment tools and methodologies, to identify policies and concrete actions designed to reduce the vulnerability of communities facing natural hazards, avoiding disasters and catastrophes. It is fundamental to set up and foster multi-stakeholder platforms for disaster risk reduction, considering local and sustainable urbanization issues (according to vulnerability and resilience indices). Planning and policy-making are the obligations of institutions that consider risk reduction,

Research has demonstrated that vulnerability is evaluated not only by exposure to hazards (perturbations and stresses) alone but also by the sensibility and resilience of the system experiencing risks and hazards.

Risk hazard models sought to understand the impact of a hazard as a function of exposure, and the typology of the entity exposed. Various lines of the investigation reveal large inadequacies of this Research Hazards model framework, it those not treat: (i) how the systems in question amplify or attenuate the impacts of the hazard; (ii) the distinctions among exposed subsystems and components that lead to significant variations in the consequences of the hazards; (iii) the role of the political economy especially social structures and institutions, in shaping differential exposure and consequences. The conditions that make exposure unsafe, leading to vulnerability have to be clarified. So, this model seems insufficiently comprehensive for the broader concerns of sustainability science.

By its turn, vulnerability analysis draws on three major concepts: (a) entitlement (license), (b) coping through diversity, (c) resilience. Different systems maintain different sensitivities to perturbations and stressors and this characteristic, for individuals and groups (human), is strongly to entitlements: legal and customary rights to exercise command over food and other necessities of life. These entitlements are determined by the units and endowments (grants). Social units also have different coping capacities, which enable them to respond to the registered harm, as well as, to alert the potential harm of a hazard. In one sense, entitlement and endowment link to these capacities, and either concept can be expanded to include a large array of social institutions, such as societal “safety nets,” that empower coping capacity.

Accordingly, risk definition elements will condition risk assessment and exposure and have implications for the variables that quantify vulnerability, resilience, and exposure.

We based this work, on the concepts defined by Zscheischler et al. (2018), adapted, as follows:

Risk

The “effect of uncertainty on objectives.” Risk is the potential for consequences when something of value is at stake and the outcome is uncertain, recognizing the diversity of values. Risks arise from the interaction between hazard, vulnerability, and exposure and can be described by the formula:

$$\mathrm{Risk}=\left(\mathrm{probability}\mathrm{of}\mathrm{events}\mathrm{or}\mathrm{trends}\right)\times \mathrm{consequences}$$

where consequences are a function of the intensity of hazard (event or trend), exposure, and vulnerability. Exposure. The presence of people, livelihoods, species or ecosystems, environmental functions, services, resources, infrastructure, or economic, social, or cultural assets in places and settings that could be adversely affected.

Vulnerability

The propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected. Vulnerability encompasses a variety of concepts and elements including sensitivity or susceptibility to harm and lack of capacity to cope and adapt.

Hazard

The potential occurrence of a natural or human-induced physical event trend or physical impact that may cause loss of life, injury, or other health impacts, as well as damage and loss to property, infrastructure, livelihoods, service provision, ecosystems, and environmental resources. Here, the term hazard usually refers to physical events or their physical impacts.

Moreover, vulnerability is an intrinsic risk factor of an individual or system exposed to a threat and expresses its predisposition to harm. Therefore, assessing and improving social vulnerability, a multidimensional concept, allows for responding and recovering from the consequences of the impacts so cannot be disconnected from the concept of social resilience (Gonçaves, 2022). In turn, the degree of vulnerability and resilience of a context is also a collective and institutional question, with social, cultural, economic, and political reciprocal implications, that also refers to the structural social structures that historically represent the model of development of social contexts (Gonçalves, 2012).

To reduce the severity of the impacts of a given phenomenon, it is necessary to implement prevention measures and forecast them as much as possible. One should also consider the risks whose impact is socially acceptable, defining methods for reducing vulnerabilities. Another important component of the discussion is the development of predictive measures, associated with scientific knowledge, informing as much as possible local communities of the potential impact of dangerous phenomena (Gonçalves and Bertolami, 2021).

These issues, will be further discussed below and integrated through the concept of safety, in the context of a model previously developed by the authors (RIMCE; Bertolami and Gonçalves, 2023). As will be seen, our proposal for the safety index encompasses the risk dimension as well as the resilience required to face uncertainty and the capability to predict and fix the damage caused by a disaster. To do that one needs a suitable socio-economic setup, RIMCE, and economic assets to acquire instruments to face adversity. As proposed and discussed in previous works (Bertolami, 2022a; Bertolami and Gonçalves, 2023), we suggest the adoption of an international and balanced social tax upon consumption of goods harmful to the Earth System, the resilience social tax.

The rainbow of risks

The threats and dangers of pre-industrial society (plague, famine, natural catastrophes, and wars) have turned, in the last phase of late modernity, into calculable risks. Compared to ancestral societies, risk can potentially cause much greater damage, material and human, and the so-called natural risk ends up giving origin to a sort of socially manufactured risk. Vulnerability and resilience constitute a concept that is inseparable from the problem of exposure to natural risks, as it enhances the negative effects resulting from impacts, as mentioned above (Gonçalves, 2012).

According to Gitz and Meybeck (2012), building up resilience connects centrally with reducing vulnerabilities. But this is not enough. Resilience requires considering two dimensions: the dimension of time and the need to deal with uncertainties.

Thus, a more resilient community might reduce vulnerabilities, but less vulnerability is not an indicator of more resilience. They are not the opposite of the same coin (Folke, 2006; Folke et al., 2010; Gonçalves and Possolo, 2012; Sherrieb et al., 2010).

Recognition of the risks inherent to this change, which manifests itself in the potentially dramatic consequences of global warming and the loss of biodiversity, requires a conscious and responsible public debate about the future of humanity on planet Earth.

Given that the Anthropocene has put us away from modernity, there is no single, monolithic way out from the risks created by human activities. The global crisis demands realistic and long-lasting global measures, which include a variety of strategies and policies and encompass the dimensions of contingency uncertainty, and deep uncertainty, related to deterministic, probabilistic, and stochastic factors within time (Walker et al., 2010).

If the future were predetermined and completely independent of human activities, the term “risk” would make little sense. Risk refers to the possibility that an undesirable occurrence takes place due to a natural event and/or human activity, contextually situated, and that asks for a decision. Assessment of risk allows for various analytic approaches. For instance, in the grid/group model, Douglas (1987) explains how individuals in different societies or social groups can adopt a risk-avoidance behavior or take risks, depending on cultural typologies. In another approach, Lima (2004) reflects on the differences between risk assessments: an objective one, as perceived by engineers and experts; and a subjective one, relative to lay people. Clearly, risk assessment is contextually related and even under the prevalence of specific social conditions, there is no abstract liability to risk (Walker et al., 2010; Wassénius and Crona, 2022).

In what concerns climate change risks, a new Welfare State is required, which not only reduces poverty but also reduces the top-down processes of benefit distribution (Giddens, 1998) and flattens risk. Thus, particular attention must be devoted to the social dimension.

Future likely/probable damages are not strictly confined to the calculation of probabilities; they encompass specific knowledge and visions of cultural and social groups (Douglas, 1987, 1992; Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982; Lima, 2004; Slovic, 1993; Tversky and Kahneman, 2001; Wynne, 1992). The perspective of the risk is shaped by human interventions, social organizations, types of knowledge, and, sometimes, divergent views in what concerns action and reaction in the face of “contradictory certainties” (Hajer, 1996; Schwarz and Thompson, 1990).

Of course, under the threat of climate change, risk must be necessarily addressed under the assumption that we are seriously running into a possible no-return situation in what concerns the main regulatory ecosystems of the Earth System. This can be assessed in generic terms (Steffen et al., 2018) or in the context of a specific model of the Earth System (Bernardini et al., 2025; Bertolami, 2022b; Bertolami and Francisco, 2018, 2019).

Estimating risk, the resilience to reduce vulnerability, and achieving safety

To manage the risks, it is relevant to consider the relationship between hazards and vulnerability. It is important to identify, analyze and quantify the potential damage of hazards, and the actions to be taken to reduce vulnerability.

In the context of the Theory of Decision (Myerson, 1991; Steele and Stefánsson, 2015; Lenton et al., 2019) a risk always is based on the conjugation of the factors in the following expressions.

$$\mathrm{R}=\mathrm{P}\mathrm{D},$$

where, P, represents the probability of occurrence of risk and, D, the economic value associated with the occurrence of damage. The rationale of this expression is clear: an event can have a high probability of occurrence, but induce low loss, or have a small probability of occurrence, but cause high damage and costs, the risk is the same in both cases.

The probabilistic nature of the risk implies that the losses of material goods, lives, and psychological trauma can only be estimated (Gonçalves and Possolo, 2012). Risk assessment requires necessarily a multidisciplinary evaluation that considers expectations about casualties and economic losses (direct impact), but also social fragility and lack of social resilience (indirect impact) once a dangerous event takes place (Carreño et al., 2005; Wassénius and Crona, 2022).

However, the dimension of resilience is not so easily assessed. Resilience is defined as the capacity to achieve positive results in high-risk situations; it can also be thought of as the capability to maintain competencies under a threat or a class of threats. Resilience allows for, when facing the unexpected, keeping competencies to recover from damages of all sorts.

Moreover, in what concerns indirect impact, individual behavior must be considered and this adds up to the dimension of uncertainty (Walker et al., 2010; Wassénius and Crona, 2022). Uncertainty increases from nature to human behavior. Some hazards are more uncertain than others, and human behavior is uncertain.

The deep uncertainty, both in nature and in individual, behavior are key factors that influence people’s vulnerability to disasters. Experience is relevant for all decisions involving the future, but contexts change and new elements affecting risk may unexpectedly appear. Usually, this residual uncertainty remains within reasonable bounds and human beings make their way in the uncertain and changing world where existing knowledge and experience suffice as a guide to future expectations (Gonçalves, 2015).

Given its importance to predicting the recovery capabilities, when facing disaster, we propose a measure of resilience. The resilience index, r, is based on the impact, D, one expects in terms of losses (material, lives, trauma) in a given disaster and the damage, D₀, that is avoided, after adopting a set of resilience measures, so that the positive parameter ∆D=D-D₀ measures the effectiveness of a set of measures to prevent damage:

$$r=\frac{\mathrm{D}}{\mathrm{\Delta }D}$$

Notice that 1 < r < ∞, where the lower extreme represents no resilience, and r → ∞ indicates a highly effective set of resilience measures. For sure, one could set up a many-component version of the resilience index, one for each type of damage under consideration. Given that this complication is inessential now, we shall consider the simplest possible implementation here.

The purpose of this quantification for the coupled set “risk-vulnerability-resilience” is to allow for an estimate of competing strategies to promote resilience within communities. As we shall see, this proposal is anchored on concrete actions as discussed in a model previously discussed by the authors, Resilience Integrated Model of Climate and Economic (RIMCE; Bertolami and Gonçalves, 2023).

For further development, we introduce the urgency variable, U, the ratio between the reaction time, ∆t, to the time available, T, to intervene and prevent a given disaster:

$$U=\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{t}}{T}$$

This allows us to arrive at the concept of safety, S:

$$S=\frac{\mathrm{r}}{RU}=\frac{\mathrm{T}}{P\mathrm{\Delta }\mathrm{t}\mathrm{\Delta }D}$$

from this, we can see that the damage, D, cancels out and, as one should expect, in the limit of P → 0 and $\mathrm{\Delta }D\to 0,$ the safety is maximum. It is easy to see that introducing the resilience index increases the safety index. Resilience leads to greater safety.

The approach we propose is experimental. The resilience index, r, and the ensued safety index can only be determined for a given strategy and a given class of risk after measuring the avoided damage, D₀, and an expectation for the damage of that type, D, is known. Once, r and S are determined, they can be considered faithful representatives of the effectiveness of the used strategy against any other ones. Of course, as with any other experimental procedure, its accuracy improves the greater the number of experimental runs and through the accumulated experience in designing strategies to face risk and on fixing the damage caused by concrete disasters. It is precisely in the context of evaluating well-defined risks and the damage that disasters cause that the safety index might be particularly useful as it allows for a quantification of different strategies and an objective comparison of their relative success and suitability.

In what follows, we shall argue that the safety index captures the most relevant issues about resilience, which is at the core of RIMCE.

Resilience Integrated Model of Climate and Economic (RIMCE)

Let us now recap some of the features of RIMCE. It arises in the context of operationalizing the ways communities can build up resilience and preventive capabilities to face risk and adversity, most particularly those that will inevitably take place due to the climate crisis.

The RIMCE model (Bertolami and Gonçalves, 2023), assumes that the community’s adaptation must materialize structural measures that guarantee its well-being through local governments as facilitators of action, putting pressure on national governments and developing small-scale demonstration projects, which can be replicated and disseminated to other contexts and levels of governance.

The main goal of RIMCE is to endow environmental services with social and economic value through the adoption of a new social tax - the resilience social tax (Bertolami, 2022a, 2022b). The capital accumulated by this new revenue must be used for protecting the environmental services and for implementing adaptation and mitigation measures to face the implications of climate change. The resilient social tax is a way to promote awareness and responsibility of the economic agents and communities. The target is consumption, which must be reduced to the minimum necessary to ensure the medium and long-term habitability and sustainability of the planet.

This means that a new path for the economy and society must be drawn. The social resilience tax can endow means to allow ecosystems to acquire an economic and political dimension. The resilience social tax provides a basis for indicators anchored on the well-being of populations and the sustainability of ecosystems. It reinforces the Welfare State through citizenship rights that go much beyond the non-neoliberal paradigm. (Bertolami and Gonçalves, 2023; Gonçalves and Bertolami, 2021). Under this optics, current economic activities are inherently risky to the Earth System creating inevitable economic and social inequalities. Fixing these imbalances requires a global effort that can be triggered by local actions (Bertolami and Francisco, 2021).

Given that we have reached an unprecedented degree of environmental degradation, the price of environmental services must be a relevant component of the cost of products; the proposed resilience social tax aims to be an instrument of an economic transition that calls for political accountability, citizen responsibility, and participation.

Any excess must be taxed, proportionally to the damage it causes in the environment and the disruption it inflicts in the Earth System equilibrium. This includes, for instance, large-scale production, extensive agriculture activities, excessive fishing and practices that cause collateral death of non-edible species, pollution of urban centers due to their high CO₂ footprint, and so on.

The resilience social tax is also a means to empower local communities with assets to implement adaptation and mitigation strategies to face the climate crisis. It is meant to prevent governance centralization and answer the fundamental question: who will pay the bill? For sure, the cost must be paid by citizens, sparing the most vulnerable as their consumption profile is more modest and less aggressive to the environment, due precisely to their structural economic vulnerability. The implementation of the resilience social tax must be a task carried out by the community, requiring public participation for its definition. The burden should be heavier on institutions and citizens that most contribute to the degradation of the environment.

Given that the specific way of implementation of the social resilience tax is to be determined by the communities, it is not all excluded that it takes the form of tax benefits, even though if implemented in this fashion it will have a much smaller impact on the fundamental goal of reducing consumption.

The resilience social tax has been conceived as a direct payment for the damage caused to the environment and ecosystems, being hence for the benefit of all. Applied at the local community level, managed by local authorities, although in articulation with the central government and with international legislation. For instance, community activities that emit CO₂ must be charged, but the ones that do not emit and or reduce emissions should acquire credits, that can be used for preserving and restoring ecosystems and the environment. The revenue could also be used for training workers in green industries, etc. (Bertolami, 2022a, 2022b; Bertolami and Francisco, 2021). This goes much beyond the existing carbon social tax, which is meant to inhibit the consumption of fossil fuels and has become another instrument of market transaction. As discussed in Bertolami (2022a), as the less privileged classes are the most badly hit by climate change, the resilience social tax upon consumption can be used to strengthen the resilience capability of that social group. In this sense, the resilience social tax is also an instrument to level social inequalities.

As a proposal involves municipalities and local government, it will also seek to increase the indicators of well-being, reduce poverty, and allow for social inclusion within a new kind of sustainable development.

Furthermore, besides, providing means to reduce risks, the resilience social tax would supply the communities with the financial funds for adaptation and mitigation, providing means to face the harmful impact of climate change framed by the resilience paradigm. Despite the different conditions of various states and communities, common and integrated political actions are required to implement our proposal at the local level and to allow for its dissemination.

Certainly, we consider that the immediate and fundamental motivations, anchored in individual, community, institutional, economic, and political values, should be also considered for the payment of the resilience social tax as we proposed earlier and discussed above, but also concerning other ethical and social issues (Gneezy and Rustichini, 2000; Rode et al., 2015).

Safety in the context of RIMCE

The safety index proposed in this work allows for a measure of the “efficiency” of the proposals suggested by RIMCE. Any model that proposes a set of concrete and workable measures to promote resilience has a higher score in terms of the safety index. RIMCE is precisely, designed for this goal, it fits the bill as it incorporates resilience into the socio-economical texture as it suggests a concrete way to raise the necessary capital to face risks and fix the outcome of disasters through the resilience social tax upon consumption. Capturing the resilience dimension concretely and objectively is on its own a relevant achievement. RIMCE allows coupling this dimension with many relevant components of the difficult issues of facing disasters. It frames the concept of resilience in an enlarged community sense showing that the process of building a network for adaptation enhances the capacities to prevent putative adversities. It changes the core of the concept, as it relates to pre-events and peri-event actions, and not only to post-event recovery capabilities. It shows that the behavior of the communities allows them for robust responses to adversities. It implies that structural measures and political decisions should include the safety index can, when based on experience, be a useful tool for projecting political measures to reduce vulnerability.

Sure, the issue of internalizing the damage to the Natural Capital by human activities can be addressed through different strategies (see, for instance, Bertolami, 2024), however, we believe that an encompassing and systematic approach as proposed by RIMCE is far more appropriate given its endurance and capability to provide long term sustainability.

Conclusions

In this work, we have suggested that a new index, safety, can be useful for designing adaptation and mitigation strategies in facing risks. Although somewhat theoretical, an immediate application in considering prevention measures to risk. The proposed index encompasses risk, vulnerability, and resilience, fundamental concepts in the discussion of risks that threaten the communities.

We believe that this proposal could provide greater objectivity in the discussion of conflicting strategies to tackle risks of any sort. Achieving safety in the face of any risk is an obvious goal of any community, thus an index that captures this dimension can be of great practical use. It is also an instrument of transparency when choosing conflicting proposals to face risks whose decisions must necessarily involve deciders, communities, economic agents, and stakeholders of any kind.

We have also discussed the way the safety index can have a natural embedding in actions designed to boost resilience capabilities, as is the goal, for instance, of the RIMCE. In this respect, we point out that the suggested resilience social tax, which effectively allows for concrete adaption and mitigation action, has the immediate implication of raising the safety index. Thus, the safety index here proposed is a quite useful instrument to evaluate mitigation and adaptation strategies and, in our view, to show that in the context of RIMCE financed by the resilience social tax, these strategies as far more effective and capable of ensuring long term resilience and sustainability.

The proposal contained in this article constitutes a theoretical reflection and an innovative proposal, continuing previous work developed by the authors, namely RIMCE (Resilience Integrated Model of Climate and Economics). The safety concept proposed in this work will be further developed bringing together the concepts of risk, resilience, and uncertainty, framing the various factors that affect scientific production and its social, political, technical, and economic impacts, focusing on the resilience of communities in the face of risks. We consider that it would be valuable to expand the discussion on its applicability and consider it when gauging different strategies to address risks and damage caused by disasters.

This proposal raises questions to be further explored about local and global issues, and, thus, competition between communities and countries and possibilities of payment leakage.