## 2 Methods
### Methods Used to Select and Analyse International Examples of Emergency DES Applications  
Third, the selection of international case studies involved a number of processes, including an international market scan, a high level screening that creates a list of potential case studies, the selection of four respective case studies, a deep dive into the four examples where further research was conducted to develop the case studies (Figure 5). Overall, the international market scan represents a filter approach which narrows down countries where Emergency DES relevant approaches have been implemented in response to the climate crisis or environmental disasters. Using this approach, we provided a shortlist of regions and countries, which have:  
* A track record for innovation and technology development;
* Been impacted by extreme weather, environmental disasters, or similar over the last 20 years;
* Relevant distributed energy-related examples. First, we performed a high-level market scan of countries' assessing their innovation potential. To filter countries at a high level, we ranked countries according to the Global Innovation Index (GII), see Box 1. The index displays a country's ability to innovate. The Global Innovation Index (GII) takes the pulse of the most recent global innovation trends. It ranks the innovation ecosystem performance of economies around the globe each year while highlighting innovation strengths and weaknesses and particular gaps in innovation metrics. Envisioned to capture as complete a picture of innovation as possible, the Index comprises around 80 indicators, including measures on the political environment, education, infrastructure, and knowledge creation of each economy. The different metrics that the GII offers can be used to monitor performance and benchmark developments against economies within the same region or income group classification [21]. We acknowledge that the GII ranking is centred around a nation's accessibility to economic and intellectual resources, which is indicated by Switzerland leading the ranking (number 1) and Australia's high ranking (Australia is ranked number 25) [21]. Therefore, the index is limited in its ability to capture innovation beyond a nation's economic setting. Second, based on the selection of countries with a high innovation index, we then narrowed down our list to countries with a history of extreme weather events, environmental disasters, or similar impacts over the last 20 years. This selection of international examples has also been informed by the nature of extreme events or climate emergencies (type and scale) that affected a region (Table 1). There is a range of challenges, such as climate change, unplanned-urbanisation, under-development, and poverty as well as other global threats (for example the current COVID-19 pandemic) that will shape disaster responses in the future. These aggravating factors will also increase the frequency, complexity, and severity of climate emergencies. We expect that this type of natural hazards grouping as shown in Table 1, which is used by international aid agencies, is becoming more intermingled as climate change will continue to modify natural phenomena and will become the dominant driver. According to the UN Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, \"decades-old projections about climate change have come true much sooner than expected. With that come changes in the intensity and frequency of hazards\" ([23], p. ii). Thus, the term \"natural disaster\" or \"natural hazard\" will gradually disappear in the literature and will be substituted by the term 'climate emergency'. Third, we applied further criteria to the crisis-prone countries to select the respective case studies. The potential case studies were narrowed down to four example regions. Here, a broad representation of different socio-economic systems, i.e., a combination of developed and developing countries--especially in the context of building resilience in rural areas, was essential.