Global Resilience
Research Network

About:

Founded by the Global Resilience Institute (GRI) at Northeastern University in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Ernst-Mach-Institut (EMI), the GRRN is a membership network of leading universities, institutes, non-profit organisations, and companies:

23 Countries, 37 Partners, +300 Researchers

The mission of the Global Resilience Research Network (GRRN) is to inform and advance resilience by providing a global platform for collaborative research. This encompasses projects, initiatives and programs addressing public and private sector needs and requirements. Interdisciplinary research insights, innovations and educational programs are shared among network partners and made available to the global community.

About

Caribbean Islands Higher Education Resilience Consortium (CIHERC)

In April 2018, Northeastern University’s Global Resilience Institute joined with the Fraunhofer Ernst-Mach-Institut (EMI) in launching the Global Resilience Research Network (GRRN). The following year, this world-wide multidisciplinary community of resilience institutes and universities committed to undertaking an Island Resilience Initiative turned into a larger organisation now referred to as the Caribbean Islands Higher Education Resilience Consortium (CIHERC) with the participants committing themselves to engaging in inter-island research collaborations for developing and sharing best resilience practices.

The institutions of higher education who have agreed to participate in Caribbean Islands Higher Education Resilience Consortium (CIHERC) have an array of research facilities that can serve as resources for fellow network partners. The shared goal is to foster research collaborations as well as training opportunities and knowledge sharing. The University of the Bahamas unveiled the Small Island Sustainability Complex in October of 2018 on their Nassau campus. The labs house fundamental research in Biology, GIS and informatics, Water Sciences, and Chemical and Environmental Analysis. The University of West Indies’ Mona Campus in Jamaica is home to the Global Tourism Resilience and Crisis Management Centre, launched in January 2019. The University of Aruba is supporting the development of resilience in small island states to include educating the workforce through its Sustainable Island Solutions through Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. In Cuba, at the Fundación Antonio Nunez Jimenez, teams of scientific researchers work on applied infrastructure projects and efforts in community education. In Mexico, at the Autonomous University of the Yucatan in the School of Anthropological Sciences, social scientists are working with community organizations to conduct surveys of the impacts of climate change at an individual level. This data is being used to create a platform to empower communities in rural areas of the Yucatan Peninsula to monitor and report issues around land tenure, agriculture, land use, and potable water resources.

Click Here for a detailed review of the consortium

GRRN Summits and Lecture Series

Inaugural 2018 Summit, Boston

The Inaugural 2018 GRRN Summit, held in Boston, USA brought together leading resilience experts from 20 major universities and research institutions from 14 countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. Powerful stories were shared by distinguished practitioners who have recently been on the front lines of managing some of the 21st century’s most catastrophic disasters.

2nd GRRN Summit, Freigburg

Fraunhofer EMI, an institute of the Fraunhofer Society, Europe’s largest organization for applied research, hosted the second summit of the Global Resilience Research Network (GRRN) on April 9–11, 2019. Fraunhofer EMI is part of the Sustainability Center Freiburg, a multidisciplinary center of resilience research, which supports the summit. The event built upon the successful launch of the GRRN at the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University in Boston in March 2018. The event brought together the world’s top academic, applied research, public policy and industry experts to exchange the latest solutions for informing and advancing resilience on multiple scales.

GRRN Lecture Series, Global

The GRRN Lecture series aims to share practical and innovative tools, applications, and skills that drive social and technical changes which strengthen the capacity of individuals, communities, systems and networks to adapt to an increasingly turbulent world. Our objective is to help advance preparedness at multiple levels to effectively respond to slowly emerging disruptions and sudden disasters, both human-made and naturally-occurring.