WISE (Creative adaptation to wicked socio-environmental disruptions) is funded by the Academy of Finland’s Strategic Research Council program entitled Adaptation and resilience for sustainable growth. The consortium is made of six subprojects with a total funding of 5.4 Meur over six years (2018-2023).

In 2018, WISE conducted comprehensive expert interviews and literature surveys to map out Finland’s resilience gaps. The resilience gap survey is an assessment of societal weaknesses to prepare for and to react to wicked disruptions. We have been designing War Room –type decision making simulations (Policy Operations Room, POR) and disruption scenarios with which to run the PORs. Three types of POR have been under design: 1) Crisis-POR, which resembles existing preparedness exercises, 2) Path-POR, which focuses on the long-term path dependencies of decisions, and 3) Probability-POR, which develops decision support systems based on Bayesian probabilities.

Analysis of the interviews of the resilience gap mapping has continued throughout the project. We organized a Path-POR in cooperation with the top administration of the city of Helsinki in november 2019, while a Probability-POR was set up with the experts of the city of Kotka in spring 2019. The latter exercise was designed as web-based due to pandemic restrictions. Moreover, we co-operated with the Regional State Administrative Agency for Southern Finland and participated in Uusimaa21 preparedness exercise (Crisis-POR) in autumn 2021.

WISE published its midterm policy briefs at the start of the corona pandemic in April 2020. The second policy brief was published in January 2023, and it outlined what could be learned from the corona pandemic.

In addition, WISE has held a public seminar on wicked problems, a public event on persistent crises, as well as two symposiums.

The WISE subprojects are led by Janne I. Hukkinen (University of Helsinki, consortium leader), Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen (University of Tampere, deputy consortium leader), Sakari Kuikka (University of Helsinki), Peter Lund (Aalto University), Toni Ahlqvist (since 2020, University of Turku), and Paavo Järvensivu (BIOS Research Unit, stakeholder interaction). For details on WISE researchers, please see below.