The Proactive Resilience Plan (PReP): An integrated framework applied to critical economic sectors
Project Overview
This study proposes a comprehensive resilience management framework that aims to bring stakeholders from different critical sectors and society together to collectively work under a common objective of achieving over-arching resilience for the nation of Qatar.
The 5-year, $4.4 million project is based on the merit that achieving a deep and truly effective national resilience framework with added value for policymaking and business continuity is only achieved by accounting for the human, social, behavioral and larger societal factors impacting physical and technological assets.

Meet the Team
This project is a collaboration between the University of Georgia, Hamad Bin Khalifa University and Qatar University. There are three teams working on aspects of critical infrastructure: physical infrastructure, manufacturing and industrial processes. Two additional teams complement this work: one builds policy and industry collaborations, and the final team includes four UGA College of Engineering faculty.
The UGA team is tasked with the system-of-systems component of the resilience strategy, asking how each factor of the plan comes together and how to evaluate resilience in each sector. The UGA team brings together skills in urban systems, civil engineering, geospatial technologies, infrastructure evaluation and engineering materials.



Alysha Helmrich, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, College of Engineering
ahelmrich@uga.edu

Lynn Abdouni, Ph.D.
Associate Research Scientist, College of Engineering
abdouni@uga.edu

Bjorn Birgisson, Ph.D., P.E.
Professor, College of Engineering
bjorn.birggison@uga.edu

Sajib Saha, Ph.D.
Assistant Research Scientist, College of Engineering
sahib.saha@uga.edu
Where we are working now

The Challenge
Climate change poses an extra risk to desert regions and coastal regions- Qatar contains both.
In order to respond to climate change and create a resilience plan for the nation, researchers and stakeholders must account for a variety of challenges:
- Sea level rise
- Global warming
- Increased storm variability
- Drought frequency
the goal
There are five sub-projects in the PReP:
- National resilience framework
- Social, societal and policy dimensions of national resilience-building
- Building resilience in physical infrastructure (water supply, power generation and transportation)
- Improve preparedness of supply chain networks
- Improving resilience in industrial plants and facilities
The UGA team is hard at work on products including an inter-sector resilience scorecard and a geospatial analysis framework for resilience projects across Qatar.

Additional Resources to Explore
Office of Research Project Page
Interview with Drs. Abdouni and Helmrich following their summer 2024 visit