The aim of this study is to investigate what women do in disaster situations and how both men and women perceive and discuss the work of women. These patterns were evidenced in the stories that were told following the fire. The study is based on 31 retrospective interviews with volunteers involved in a large Swedish forest fire and focuses on stories about the supportive work of women during this fire. The results indicate that women were praised when they followed the traditional norms but were denigrated when they performed what was perceived as male-coded tasks. The stories reveal norms about what a woman is and is not by focusing on women's age and clothing and by directly and indirectly questioning their abilities and authority. The norms are also rendered visible by the positive attention that women receive while describing doing what is expected of a woman. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

September 2015 saw a sharp increase in the influx of refugees in the Øresund region. In this study, resilience defined as flexible adaptation was taken as a baseline to guide interviews with societal infrastructure actors and NGOs engaged in managing the situation. Different actors had different organisational preconditions that influenced their ability to adapt to the new situation. Among the strongest drivers behind resilient performance were the organisation’s ways of relating to established rules, regulations, procedures and processes, the way relationships were formed between people and hierarchical layers within the organisations, and the perceived value of the human operator and the human contribution within the organisational whole. These values, in turn, determined how the organisations shaped many of the basic conditions that allowed resilient performance to develop. In the study it was found, for public actors in particular, that the criteria necessary to adapt to the situation were not met by organisational structures and processes.

Research facilities such as spallation sources and synchrotrons generate radiation for use in atomic-level or molecular-scale experiments. These facilities can be viewed as complex safety-critical systems. An important aspect of the safety management of such systems is the short safety education and training programme the users are required to undergo in order to gain facility access. As research on the topic is limited, this study aimed to increase the knowledge about current education design and practice using the perspectives of safety science and pedagogy. Study objectives were to identify preconditions that impact the safety education design, to describe current design and practice of the safety education, and to identify weaknesses and possibilities for improvement. Site visits with a total of 20 interviews were performed at three research facilities. The results show the need for sufficient resources to maintain learning activities for users, provide pedagogical continuing education for educators, and maintain safety culture-enhancing activities to meet the challenges of having large numbers of short-term facility users. Increased focus should be placed on safety-related competence needs and the mapping of these to match the competence of individual users. New thinking and innovation can benefit the design and provision of such education activities, based on both socio-technical system and system safety perspectives. 

To outline a framework for preparedness planning at the organizational level.The study is based on a content analysis of research literature as well as an analysis of interviews with six preparedness planners working in Swedish local authorities.The study setting included Swedish local authorities of different sizes.The participants are preparedness planners responsible for coordinating crisis management work in Swedish local authorities. The study includes preparedness planners with different backgrounds, education, experiences, and gender.A presentation of 19 factors of preparedness planning identified in the literature and a discussion around how preparedness planners perceive those factors.The main outcome measures are knowledge about how both researcher and practitioner understand and argue around different factors of preparedness planning.The result of this study is a framework for preparedness planning. As preparedness planning ought to be a learning process, the presented framework builds on four areas connected to learning: prerequisites for preparedness planning, who should be involved, what is to be learned, and how should the work be shaped.The analysis of factors identified in the literature and also in the interviews with preparedness planners illustrates that the four areas connected to learning are required for developing a preparedness planning process.

Risk and vulnerability analysis is a tool that is used to prevent and prepare our society for crises. Today Swedish municipalities are required to perform such an analysis as part of their crisis management work. Although these analyses are described as important for crisis management, there are not many studies that indicate how it is important.The purpose of this report is to describe municipal risk and vulnerability analysis and how the results of the work is utilized. The goals are to contribute to the development of the Swedish crisis management system and provide feedback to the municipalities and county councils interviewed in this study.The results show that today the focus is on risk and vulnerability analysis and the methods for performing them, and not on how they is used in society. In the effort to further develop risk and vulnerability analysis (and crisis management work) there is a need to analyze the methods that lead to positive development and those that need to change. We must dare to ask an unpleasant question about whether there is value to working the way we do today, or whether we should try something new that perhaps is better suited for analyzing our complex social system.Key words: Risk and vulnerability analysis, municipality, crisis management, preparednessNyckelord: Risk- och sårbarhetsanalys, kommun, krishantering, förberedelser

Risk analyses are seen as a vital tool for crisis prevention and developing capability to respond to future crises. In Sweden, all municipalities are required to perform risk and vulnerability analyses as a basis for their crisis management work. The aim of this paper is to study how and why a risk and vulnerability analysis can become a part of an organisational process for learning how to prevent and prepare for crises. This is done through a study of civil servants in Swedish municipalities and county administrative boards about how they develop and use risk and vulnerability analysis for creating a crisis management capability within the organisation. It is shown that the results from risk and vulnerability analyses normally are not transferred within or beyond the municipalities and that the learning within the organisation and within society is thus limited. © 2023 The Author(s)

This study takes the perspective of civil society and aims to examine how different volunteers are framed both by others and themselves, and how terms such as ‘mixed blessing’ (used to describe volunteers as both a blessing and a curse) affect how volunteers are perceived during a crisis. Our objective is to further understand the consequences this may entail regarding how voluntary resources are integrated and requisitioned. Interviews were conducted with volunteers involved in the response to a large forest fire in Västmanland, Sweden in 2014. The results show four different types of volunteers, which we have classified as: the caring neighbourhood volunteers, pre-organised emergency volunteers, non-emergency professionals, and unneeded volunteers. Their contribution in a crisis is related to three areas: when they arrive at the scene (time), what resources they bring (resources), and whether or not pre-established arrangements to integrate them into the operation exist (structure). The study results indicate the need to develop and apply various strategies for efficient use of different volunteers' resources to ensure crisis preparedness.

Increased risk of wildfires is often highlighted in media coverage of climate change in the Nordic countries. How an increased risk is reflected in the concerns and adaptive measures within the most likely affected communities is nevertheless not known. This study investigates concerns and adaptation to wildfires in a rural community in south-eastern Sweden. The comparatively dry study area has a history of frequent but often low-consequence wildfires and is projected to experience Sweden’s largest increase in severe fire weather towards 2100. Through narratives, this study elucidates potential wildfire concerns in this area and motivations behind adaptation measures. The narratives are compared to a physical causal network extracted from the literature on fires and their consequences in the region. Residents foresee an increased wildfire risk but do not consider it a threat to the future well-being of the community. Forest owners and homeowners express low commitment in preventive or adaptive measures. Instead, contrasting the reality of the twentieth century, the fire service is currently considered to be responsible for both preventing and suppressing fires. This attitude is attributed to the lack of severe implications from the generally well-managed fires in the region. Actions for prevention and adaptation seem triggered by media attention or experience from real high-consequence events occurring elsewhere, rather than local wildfire occurrence or climate change projections. © The Author(s) 2024.

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the emerging COVID-19 threat a pandemic following the global spread of the virus. A year later, a number of governments are being handed the concluding reports of national public inquiries tasked with investigating responses, mishaps, and identifying lessons for the future. The present article aims to identify a set of learning obstacles that may hinder effective lessons drawing from the COVID-19 pandemic responses. The seven obstacles discussed in this article are: (1) retaining lessons and implementing them effectively, (2) effectively drawing lessons from other countries, (3) the potential for reforms to introduce unanticipated vulnerabilities elsewhere in the system, (4) political pressure, (5) drawing the conclusions from observations, (6) experts versus decision makers, and (7) reforms may not be related to the actual crisis. Exploring these obstacles will be central to future discussions concerning which kinds of responses will set precedent for future pandemics and global health crises. 

Disasters such as the storms that affected Sweden in 2005 and 2007 showed that citizens initially conducted a large part of the disaster response, such as clearing roads, giving psychosocial support to affected neighbours and repairing power lines in collaboration with power companies. As a result of these storms, an Emergent Citizen Group (ECG) was established in a village which continued to work on risk prevention, even after the event. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyse this local emergent citizen group’s continuing work on the prevention of local risk and vulnerability, and particularly, their work on flood prevention. The results indicate that authorities seldom understand the ECG’s concerns about risks. Authorities also lack the experience and capacity to collaborate with, and support, the ECG’s risk and vulnerability reduction work. Bureaucratic barriers and declining motivation among volunteers within the ECGs could undermine commitment to the prevention of risks.

The relationship between geographical and social forms of remoteness and the concepts of vulnerability and capacity remains unclear. Recognising that capacities and vulnerabilities tend to co-exist in a population, the article assumes that the dynamics between these concepts are situational. In this article we draw on three cases to analyse the issue. An Arctic case study provides insight on remoteness in terms of latitude, followed by an Andean case study reflecting on the role of altitude, and lastly an Island community case study provides a perspective on external isolation (recognising that island communities are also typically connected). From these cases we glean a number of preliminary insights for further investigation. One is that remote communities tend to avoid dependence on external actors when possible. Second, power dynamics between remote communities and centralised actors can make disaster management difficult if local capacities are overrun but trust is not present. Third, remoteness mainly becomes a direct source of vulnerability if remoteness translates into neglect, rendering places ‘peripheral’. Generalisable insights suggest that relationships take time to build and cannot be easily established after the fact. The cases hence suggest that remote areas typically have a strained relationship with centralised authorities which fosters local coping strategies but also a fear of external dependence, which may ultimately prove problematic in times of adversity. © 2021 The Authors

Across the scholarly and journalistic literature, an increasing sense of future uncertainty and prevailing sense of dread is being narrated. This unsettling sense of futurelessness seems to cut across scales in that globally unfolding menaces also shape lived experience locally in specific sites, where global risks intersect with local hazardousness of place. In this chapter, we reflect on how a set of communities facing different kinds of threatened futures have engaged with their predicament. Our cases are Lyngen in the Norwegian Arctic and Falsterbo and Kiruna in Sweden. Engaging these cases, we probe the complexities of decisions on planned relocation or staying in place. We also explore ideas on how living with the knowledge of a threatened future impacts senses of existential security and everyday life in the present, where literature on doom, slow calamity and futurelessness is also emerging. We take as our point of departure that capacities and vulnerabilities exist alongside one another in populations. This chapter concerns the insights that potentially futureless places can teach us about capacities to endure, and forms of existential insecurity in the face of doom. 

Climate change is increasing the risk for extreme weather events such as heatwaves, including in northern countries like Sweden, which until recent years has had limited experiences of coping with extreme heat. Based on predictions that Sweden will be more frequently exposed to heatwaves in the future, it is imperative to increase the societal resilience and adaptation measures. This paper presents a qualitative interview study involving 19 participants and their experiences of caring for vulnerable people during the heatwave in 2018. The participants represent four different organizations (working directly or indirectly with vulnerable people) in two municipalities in Sweden, including preschools, homes for the elderly, homecare services, and care homes for people with functional impairments, which were all impacted during the heatwave. This study contributes new empirical insights about the heatwave in 2018 and, in particular, similarities and differences in both experiences and adaptation measures across the four organizations. The findings show how both staff and vulnerable people suffered from the consequences of heat which increased vulnerability, how some organizations lacked enough (qualified) staff to secure routines, and that few evaluations and formal changes were done after the heatwave.

Multifunctional climate adaptation measures – Responsibilities, cooperation and challenges Climate adaptation measures within already built-up urban environments is complex, due to several factors. A large number of actors are required for success, but both the responsibility of each actor and the distribution of responsibility between these actors are unclear. Success depends to a large extent on the ability to cooperate between the various actors operating in an area. This project uses interviews, co-production and literature studies to describe the challenges, identify blockages and support the collaboration between the various parties. The project identified uncertainties regarding the laws required to manage climate adaptation measures in built-up urban environments that we needed to address. This resulted in an expansion of the project with a focus on the law around climate risks regarding socially important activities which is presented in Climate adaptation of socially important activities – legal challenges, RISE report 2024:14, ISBN 978-91- 89896-59-8 written by Jenny Lundahl (2024). A newly created collaboration model is presented here focusing on the startup phase. It is supplemented with tips on methods and tools that can facilitate the work, and a description of different ways to sort how to single out responsibilities and where the cost for the measures taken will be localized.

In the present article, practices of inclusion of different types of volunteers in the response to a large-scale forest fire in Sweden are studied. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with three types of voluntary actors. The volunteers were organized to different degrees, from members of organizations and participants in emergent groups to organizationally unaffiliated individuals. Organized volunteers were the most easily included, particularly if they were members of voluntary emergency organizations. It was difficult for volunteers lacking relevant organizational affiliation to be included. Disaster response operations are dynamic, conditions change over time, and tensions between different modes, degrees, and levels of inclusion may arise. However, irrespective of changing conditions, practices of inclusion of highly organized volunteers work best. © 2018 The Authors Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

To gain legitimacy for climate change adaptation decisions, the distribution of responsibility for these decisions and their implementation needs to be grounded in theories of just distribution and what those affected by decisions see as just. The purpose of this project is to contribute to sustainable spatial planning and the ability of local and regional public authorities to make well-informed and sustainable adaptation decisions, based on knowledge about both climate change impacts and the perceptions of residents and civil servants on what constitutes a sustainable distribution of responsibility. Our aims are: (1) a better understanding of the practical implications of theories about just distribution of responsibility for the choice of local and regional climate adaptation measures; (2) knowledge about what residents and civil servants consider a sustainable distribution of responsibility for climate adaptation measures; and (3) a better understanding of conflicts concerning the distribution of responsibilities and systematic knowledge about the possibilities to manage them. In this interdisciplinary project, we study six municipalities and their residents, and two county administrative boards, all in Sweden, using mixed methods: value theory, document studies, interviews, focus groups, and surveys

In the summer of 2018, both fire and rescue services and volunteers fought against the extensive wildfires that spread over the northern parts of Sweden. The challenges were many and one of the most obvious was the lack of resources provided by the state, both material and human. This lack of official resources, together with the long distances that characterize the rural northern parts of Sweden, have been highlighted in subsequent evaluations as one of the main reasons for the widely spread fires. The lack of official resources in itself can be understood as a consequence of several years of dismantling and centralization of the Swedish fire and rescue service. However, the responses from the local community were enormous. Local volunteers, spontaneous as well as organized, assisted in firefighting; in providing food and services; in offering shelter for evacuated, and many other things. In disaster research, volunteer activities have often been described as something that “fills the void” when official resources are scarce. This seems to be particularly true in rural contexts. This paper applies a critical perspective on rural disaster volunteerism by framing it as an expression of rural vulnerability and peripheralization: as something that is performed as a compensatory act in rural communities affected by social dismantling. In other words, both place and politics are central in understanding rural voluntary activity. Inspired by the theoretical concept geographies of voluntarism, this paper argues that people make sense of volunteer initiatives in relation to both the place where these activities take place and in relation to the power relations associated with this place. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore how rural disaster volunteerism intersects with structural conditions of rurality. © 2024 The Authors

Many countries have established disaster risk management (DRM) systems to reduce disaster risks and improve societal safety. Risk assessment in the DRM system is not only an important tool to identify potential risks, but also promotes DRM through conversations among stakeholders from different functional sectors and administrative levels. The municipal risk assessment, produced at the lowest administrative level of the system, is often expected to fulfill two purposes. One is to meet municipalities’ own, local DRM needs, while the other is to contribute to regional and national-level work. This article takes the multi-level, multi-stakeholder, bottom-up Swedish DRM system as a representative example to investigate the perceived challenges and opportunities emerging from the preparation of these dual-purpose assessments. Empirical data were collected through 42 semi-structured interviews and related documentation from 18 local municipalities and six regional authorities in Sweden. The findings, representing perceived challenges and opportunities were categorized into six themes: the focus of municipal RVA work; the template and evaluation criteria for municipal RVAs; municipal RVA work as a continuous process; the dissemination of municipal RVAs; feedback from the county administrative board; and the benefits and drawbacks of municipal RVA work.

Distribution of responsibility is one of the main focus areas in discussions about climate change ethics. Most of these discussions deal with the distribution of responsibility for climate change mitigation at the international level. The aim of this paper is to investigate if and how these principles can be used to inform the search for a fair distribution of responsibility for climate change adaptation on the local level. We found that the most influential distribution principles on the international level were in turn built on one or more of seven basic principles: (P1) equal shares, (P2) desert, (P3) beneficiary pays, (P4) ability, (P5) self-help, (P6) limited responsibility for the worst off, and (P7) status quo preservation. It was found that all the basic principles, but P1, P3, and P7, are to some extent translatable to local climate adaptation. Two major problems hamper their usefulness on the local level: (1) several categories of agents need to take on responsibility; and (2) emissions do not work as a base for all principles. P4, P5, and P6 are applicable to local adaptation without changes. P4 is of particular importance as it seems to solve the first problem. P2 is applicable only if the second problem is solved, which can be achieved by using risk of harm instead of emissions as the basis for desert.

For successful climate change adaptation, the distribution of responsibility within society is an important question. While the literature highlights the need for involving both public and private actors, little is still known of how citizens perceive their own and others’ responsibility, let alone the moral groundings for such perceptions. In this paper, we report the results of a survey regarding people’s attitudes towards different ways of distributing responsibility for climate change adaptation. The survey was distributed to citizens in six Swedish municipalities and completed by 510 respondents. A large number of respondents wanted to assign responsibility for making decisions about and implementing adaptation measures to local governments, but also to property owners, whereas the national government was raised as responsible for setting decision boundaries and for financial support. The most preferred principles for a fair distribution of responsibility among the respondents were desert, ability, efficiency and need, while the principle of equal shares found less support. All principles received some support, indicating that it is necessary to consider several principles when distributing responsibility for climate change adaptation. Compared to earlier studies, this study shows more nuanced perceptions on who should be responsible and on what moral grounds. © 2021 by the authors. 

In this article, we examine public policy change at the local level of governance in the aftermath of an extraordinary event. Using the case study of a Swedish municipality after the sweeping forest fire of 2014, we contend that policy entrepreneurship, like its market counterpart, may under certain conditions take on a wider range of behaviors that are not underpinned by the proactive quest for opportunities. Rather, a sense of urgency and necessity, professional norms, and some keen technical skills make for a different kind of entrepreneurship, which we label reactive policy entrepreneurship. © 2023 The Authors. 

The transport system is a large system of systems which currently faces challenges because of the climate-change-induced need to decrease the use of fossil fuels. The aim of mitigating climate change is realized in many parts of the transport system, concurrently and at high pace, which brings with it many challenges for the resilience of the system. By resilience, we mean the ability of a system to adapt due to disruptions and surprises. There are numerous links between the different systems that form the transport system and the actors responsible for available choices in the system of systems need to be identified. The aim of this paper is to identify requirements for developing a method for increasing resilience in the transport system. In this study a description of the electrified goods transport system as a system of systems is developed through a combination of researchers from different areas and discussions with experts mainly in the field of transport and governance. The resulting system of systems is presented in the paper together with a list of measures that will aid the development of a resilient electrified goods transport system. The measures are divided into technology, organisation and behaviour.

IMPROVER is a Horizon 2020 project focusing on how to improve European critical infrastructure resilience to crises and disasters through the implementation of resilience concepts to real life examples of pan-European significance, including cross-border examples.

The project will develop methodologies for the implementation of societal, organisational and technological resilience concepts to critical infrastructure. To this end, it requires several resilience-related concepts to be identified and defined.

This is the final version of the IMPROVER Lexicon of Definitions. It is the result of the international survey conducted by the project and it gathers several resilience concepts and their definitions, as well as other key related terms from all the current, completed deliverables in the project.

In this final version of the document, we offer a list of terms and their definitions which will reflect the assumptions of the proposed IMPROVER methodology and will be used by the project partners for the duration of the project. This lexicon will also serve as a recommendation for terminology towards the project partners, the associated partners, the collaborating projects and the CIP community in general.

This study explores how the Fire and Rescue Service can better prepare for solving complex problems in emergencies by using the concept of problems and problem-solving networks. Primary and secondary data from an extensive fire incident were analysed, including semi-structured interviews and incident assessment reports. Complex problems that arise during emergencies can be challenging to define, and solutions can be difficult to identify. However, this study demonstrates that breaking down complex problems into sub-problems can facilitate the identification of what kind of problem-solving network is needed to be able to solve problems in emergencies. Overall, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the rationale behind problem-solving network in emergency situations and highlights the importance of relationships in problem-solving network to address complex problems during emergencies.