Platform to Support Development of Risk Scenarios Posed by COVID-19 and Converging Threats on the U.S. Trade Supply Chain Infrastructure

Issue: Given the complex and disruptive nature of COVID-19 to supply chains and infrastructure systems, this project  will build a risk-guided platform to support development of risk scenarios posed by the pandemic and converging threats on the U.S. trade supply chain infrastructure, with a focus on food and agriculture supply chains.

Objective: This project from the Cross-Border Threat Screening and Supply Chain Defense (CBTS) Center of Excellence in partnership with the Texas A&M University College of Engineering will develop a platform that provides access to datasets, predictive models, and experts’ opinions that are useful in generating evidence-based support on the impacts of COVID-19 on U.S. trade supply chains.  When completed, the platform will allow identification and characterization of evidence depicting the dynamics of infrastructure interactions of U.S. domestic and international trade supply chains, from procurement, manufacturing, and warehousing, to transportation processes.

Outcome: The risk framework will lead to the formulation of a comprehensive risk assessment model, mapping numerous participating processes needed to simulate ‘prognosis and diagnosis scenarios’ of social, economic and environmental impacts. This will require collection of evidence on the components that will define risk baselines:

• COVID-19 as the central biothreat of interest and all other natural and anthropogenic converging threats that may occur concurrently (e.g. weather, geopolitics, seasonal infectious diseases);
• the state of vulnerability or robustness of all systems put in place to withstand the potential simultaneous effects of these threats (e.g. trade supply chain infrastructure systems);
• the social, economic and environmental assets exposed to them (e.g. people, economy, and the environment).

Value Proposition: This platform developed in this project will support the analysis of risk mitigating strategies and improve efforts to assess the resiliency and sustainability U.S. supply chains.