Planning for Resiliency: How the University of Chicago and AEI Are Supporting Disaster Response
Natural disasters and severe weather events are becoming a growing concern for universities. Their effects can disrupt operations, threaten infrastructure, and put students, faculty, and staff at risk. Higher education institutions must be able to effectively withstand and recover from adverse incidents to maintain operational continuity and ensure access to services.
In their webinar for Spaces4Learning, AEI’s Joss Hurford and the University of Chicago’s Brian Bozell discuss how the university partnered with AEI to produce a utility master plan to support the campus’s disaster response, emergency preparedness, and critical research activities. Recognizing the challenge of balancing campus growth against the need for enhanced resilience, the team developed an infrastructure resilience model as part of the plan to quantify risk in terms of probability, severity, and recoverability.
Resiliency modeling can ultimately help organizations identify system dependencies that lead to cascading failures, calculate the risks posed by the threat environment, and assess the impact of possible mitigation measures. The model incorporates recoverability as a key factor, evaluating the speed, cost, and effectiveness of restoring critical systems following an event, while also integrating risk reduction as a measurable metric in decision-making.
The University of Chicago’s utility master plan demonstrates that risk-informed planning is not only possible—it’s essential. The university and AEI established a quantifiable, stakeholder-driven framework for identifying and mitigating risk. The model facilitated strategic decision-making that prioritized continuity of critical operations, improved resilience, and supported long-term sustainability.