ENRING
Enring: increasing the multi-hazard resilience of critical buildings
Enring is a research project funded by the La Caixa Foundation through the Postdoctoral Junior Leader Fellowships Retaining Call 2025.
The overall aim of Enring is to develop a multi-layered defence framework to increase the structural resilience of critical buildings against multiple hazards.
The project commenced in October 2025 and is scheduled to span three years
Keeping the lights on: essential services in extreme events
Our society faces growing risks from extreme events, whether triggered by natural or human-made hazards. These events often disrupt critical facilities, triggering chain reactions that can escalate hazards into large-scale disasters with significant social impacts. Ensuring that essential infrastructure—such as hospitals, shelters, schools, and communication centres—remains functional during and after such events is therefore vital for effective emergency response and recovery.
Current design guidelines, notably those primarily established by the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), aim to enhance the resilience of critical structures against multiple hazards. However, these guidelines generally adopt a siloed approach to hazard mitigation, requiring distinct procedural workflows for each considered hazard. While they may propose a qualitative design matrix to address potential multi-hazard interactions, they generally omit explicit, quantitative consideration of the interactions between different mitigation measures. Furthermore, these design frameworks typically focus on threat-dependent hazards characterised by a specific magnitude and return period (e.g., floods, fires, winds, and earthquakes), limiting their applicability for mitigating “black-swan” events (i.e., an extremely rare and unpredictable occurrence yet resulting in massive, widespread consequences).
The proposed multi-layered defence framework
The proposed framework introduces multiple layers of defence to protect critical buildings from different types of hazards (Fig. 1). These layers include strategies for hazard prevention, damage mitigation, and, finally, failure containment. Prevention and mitigation focus on common and predictable hazards that occur frequently but typically have limited consequences, aiming to reduce their impact early on. Containment, on the other hand, serves as the final safeguard against rare and unpredictable events with severe outcomes. The synergetic interaction between these layers is essential to achieving structural systems that are genuinely resilient to multiple hazards.
OBJECTIVES
The overall aim of Enring is to develop a multi-layered defence framework to increase the structural resilience of critical buildings against multiple hazards. To achieve this ultimate goal, the project is focused on the following four specific objectives:
- Objective 1: to understand how design measures interact in a building system.
- Objective 2: to define a multi-layered framework that produces synergy.
- Objective 3: to validate the framework’s effectiveness through large-scale testing.
- Objective 4: to disseminate the research findings to relevant stakeholders.
METHODOLOGY
Four work packages (WPs) have been defined to achieve the overall aim of Enring (Fig. 2).
WP1. Understanding the interaction between design measures in a building system
To define a suitable framework, a deeper understanding of the interaction between design measures in a building system is necessary. The WP will evaluate various hazard combinations that may co-exist in real design scenarios and then classify the design measures for these corresponding hazards according to their roles in prevention, mitigation, or containment. Building upon this, we will then identify measures which can potentially interact negatively, neutrally, or positively with other measures.
WP2. Defining a multi-layered framework that produces synergy
After identifying and mapping all relevant interactions between hazard measures, we will define a multi-layer framework that explicitly accounts for the synergy. The framework will first be applied to the design of the individual element and then assessed at a global level. As there will be multiple acceptable solutions that comply with the design requirements, a cost-benefit analysis will be performed to compare and select the optimal solution.
WP3. Performing experimental validation
To test the effectiveness of the framework, we will implement it for designing a building specimen made of reinforced concrete. The specimen will be subjected to four damage scenarios to trigger different damage stages: from minor to severe ones. At each stage, different protective layers will be triggered, and building responses will be monitored.
WP4. Develop a suitable exploitation strategy
We will partner with relevant stakeholders (structural designers, contractors, and code-makers) to develop some design examples that can help to demonstrate how the framework can be incorporated into a design workflow.
IMPACT
The success of Enring will lay the foundation for designing structures that are truly resilient against a wide spectrum of hazards. Rather than relying on isolated, non-integrated solutions, the framework takes advantage of the synergy between multiple protective measures to achieve robust building performance in a cost-efficient manner. Ultimately, enhancing the resilience of critical facilities will strengthen society’s ability to thrive and adapt to future challenges.
The project receives support from a fellowship from the “la Caixa” Foundation (ID 100010434). The fellowship code is LCF/BQ/PR25/12110011, which is awarded to Dr Andri Setiawan through the Postdoctoral Junior Leader Fellowships Retaining Call 2025.