Balancing climate resilience and adaptation for Caribbean Small Island Developing States (SIDS): Building institutional capacity.

Although the Caribbean's Small Island Developing States (SIDS) minimally contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions, they face disproportionate climate risks and are particularly susceptible to systemic economic threats posed by climate change and subsequent increases in climate variability. Historically, strategic programs and investments have sought to develop more robust and adaptive engineered systems to absorb climate threats. However, such initiatives are limited and under-resourced in the SIDS' context.

Governing biotechnology to provide safety and security and address ethical, legal, and social implications.

The field of biotechnology has produced a wide variety of materials and products which are rapidly entering the commercial marketplace. While many developments promise revolutionary benefits, some of them pose uncertain or largely untested risks and may spur debate, consternation, and outrage from individuals and groups who may be affected by their development and use. In this paper we show that the success of any advanced genetic development and usage requires that the creators establish technical soundness, ensure safety and security, and transparently represent the product's ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI).

Mainstreaming resilience analytics: 10 years after the Fukushima disaster.

Multiple events over the last decade, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrate a global lack of preparedness for low probability but high consequence events. Following the evaluation of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, these authors called for a change from a risk-oriented approach to a resilience-focused framework for managing such disruptions. Over the past five years, the field of resilience analytics has conceptualized further resilience frameworks within the context of infrastructure development; however, the practice of resilience planning is still lagging behind the theories developed in the literature.

Resilience: Directions for an Uncertain Future Following the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The concept of resilience is multi-faceted. This commentary builds upon the analytical distinctions of resilience provided by Urquiza et al. (2021, https://doi.

Native populations and the opioid crisis: forging a path to recovery.

American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) populations have proven particularly susceptible to the opioid crisis in the USA, but the White House's 2019 national opioid policy roadmap is not structured to address AI/AN vulnerabilities. The concept of resilience, usually considered a positive system attribute, can be applied to complex systems to understand the larger compensatory interactions that restore systems to previous structures despite disruptions or interventions. The opioid crisis is a case of detrimental resilience because even effective interventions have not succeeded in eradicating opioid abuses.

The challenges of data usage for the United States' COVID-19 response.

During the coronavirus pandemic, policy makers need to interpret available public health data to make decisions affecting public health. However, the United States' coronavirus response faced data gaps, inadequate and inconsistent definitions of data across different governmental jurisdictions, ambiguous timing in reporting, problems in accessing data, and changing interpretations from scientific institutions. These present numerous problems for the decision makers relying on this information.

System models for resilience in gerontology: application to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The care needs for aging adults are increasing burdens on health systems around the world. Efforts minimizing risk to improve quality of life and aging have proven moderately successful, but acute shocks and chronic stressors to an individual's systemic physical and cognitive functions may accelerate their inevitable degradations. A framework for resilience to the challenges associated with aging is required to complement on-going risk reduction policies, programs and interventions.

The Need to Reconcile Concepts that Characterize Systems Facing Threats.

Desirable system performance in the face of threats has been characterized by various management concepts. Through semistructured interviews with editors of journals in the fields of emergency response and systems management, a literature review, and professional judgment, we identified nine related and often interchangeably used system performance concepts: adaptability, agility, reliability, resilience, resistance, robustness, safety, security, and sustainability. A better understanding of these concepts will allow system planners to pursue management strategies best suited to their unique system dynamics and specific objectives of good performance.

Building biosecurity for synthetic biology.

The fast-paced field of synthetic biology is fundamentally changing the global biosecurity framework. Current biosecurity regulations and strategies are based on previous governance paradigms for pathogen-oriented security, recombinant DNA research, and broader concerns related to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Many scholarly discussions and biosecurity practitioners are therefore concerned that synthetic biology outpaces established biosafety and biosecurity measures to prevent deliberate and malicious or inadvertent and accidental misuse of synthetic biology's processes or products.