How Critical is Critical? Towards a Decision Framework for Disaster-specific Critical Entities

During recent disaster and crisis events, it became more and more evident that critical infrastructures are of utmost importance for a quick recovery from these events. However, not all infrastructures might be equally critical in a crisis scenario; some organizations might be more critical during some disasters than during others. Additionally, due to current regulation, even more organizations are categorized as “critical”, which makes it more difficult to the most relevant ones during a crisis. In this paper, we present an identification and classification approach for the importance of critical entities during a disaster or incident. This approach is related to standard risk and resilience management processes and can be directly integrated into the first phases of these processes. In particular, it takes the nature of the disaster as well as of the respective entity into account and sets them in relation to each other. Additionally, it also considers the economic and societal role of the individual entity, i.e., their importance for different industry sectors and their supply chains as well as for the well-being of society in general. To show how the decision process would work in a realistic scenario, we apply it for a pandemic scenario and a supply shortage scenario. Additionally, we also generally discuss how the process can be applied in other domains.