WISE 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 has 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 react to wicked disruptions. We are also designing War Room –type decision making simulations (Policy Operations Room, POR) and disruption scenarios with which to run the PORs. Three types of POR are 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.

At the moment we are transcribing and analyzing the expert interviews of the resilience gap mapping, and designing the PORs in collaboration with stakeholders. In addition, we are planning a public WISE-seminar on wicked problems.

The first POR-exercise is likely to take place during the first half of 2019.

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.