Resilience in a Changing World

The “apocalypse”, the complete final destruction of the world, often is represented by its four horsemen, riders symbolizing the historical threats of pestilence, war, famine, and death. Language surrounding the unfolding coronavirus pandemic often is apocalyptic, and allusions are made to future pandemics with much higher mortality rates and transmission by asymptomatic people, modern Typhoid Marys. Whether today or in 10 years, the sky will fall inevitably – the propagation of disease is a modern-day risk that we must manage better.

But pandemics are not the only risk we face. It is 10 past midnight on the climate doomsday clock and droughts, floods, species extinctions, violent storms, and rising sea levels comprise the climate disaster outlook. We are cooking our planet and there is a need for urgent action. As the climate changes, we will witness rising waters, thereby creating refugees from islands around the world and from the coastal communities where most people live. As the oceans rise, those people will have to be relocated. Likewise we can see the traumas and consequences of droughts and increasingly violent and more frequent weather events. If we are unable to turn the tide on climate change, and increasingly we seem to be failing, then we can anticipate the coming changes. If we are unable to mitigate climate change, then we must prepare to accommodate it.

But the risks we face go far beyond pandemics and climate change. Many organisations evaluate the range of risks on the horizon that could impact life as we know it, whether we consider only human welfare or, more broadly, all species and ecosystem equilibria[1].  The risks can be presented in a condensed way with the following list. Notably the original four are ever-present.

 1.Disease – the risk of pandemics is expected to grow as the climate changes, new forms of disease emerge, globalisation widens and deepens, human dwellings become denser with continued urbanisation, and more frequent and more rapid human interactions and exchanges make disease communication increasingly efficient.

2.Famine – the World Food Programme has warned that the coronavirus pandemic will cause global famines of 'biblical proportions'. In fact, the risks of famine connect directly to climate change, environmental degradation, pandemics, water distribution, conflict, and global food supply logistics management. 

3.Conflict – unfortunately the seeds of conflict are ever-present in human societies despite lessons taught and retaught over centuries, but never learned. Though the motto of the UN was and is Never Again, whether rooted in grabs for power, disputes over land, water or other resources, religion, or other discord, conflict remains a permanent stain on the human condition. The modern world is witness to other forms of actual or potential conflict, whether social uprising against inequity, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, or domestic and other forms of terrorism.

4.Resources: Human overconsumption of the planet’s natural resources imperils the life we know. By 2060 resource use is expected to grow from 11.9 to 18.5 tonnes per capita. If the global per capita average for resource consumption were to reach the average of high-income countries, 27 tonnes, humankind would require 7 planet earths to deliver the needed resources.

5.Environment -- Shutting down the world’s economy because of the coronavirus pandemic has led to notable improvements in the environment. As industry has shuttered and movement of goods and people has stopped, air has cleared and waters have purified. Pollution has dropped everywhere, whether smog in L.A. or India, particulate haze in China, or water qualities in the Adriatic. People have registered on the improvements in their ambient environments, and it is likely that demand for better environmental quality will surge as the world emerges from the pandemic.

6.Disasters: earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, droughts, locusts, hurricanes, tornados, eruptions, sunspots, landslides – all have occurred over previous millenia and will occur over future millenia. What is new are the increases in phenomena from environmental degradation and climate change and in human impacts from increased presence of people in danger zones.

7.Technology: Modern society depends very much on effective networks to deliver energy, water, communications, transport, and food, as well as coordination among the spectra of product supply chains. Failure in technology, whether as IT or other and whether as human intentional or unintentional failures, is an important risk. The risks include both artificial intelligence as it surpasses human intelligence and data protection.

8.Refugees -- there is a continuing calamity of desperate souls in overcrowded boats that overturn or in caravans crossing inhospitable, unforgiving deserts while en route to unwilling hosts and borders that may be closed. See previous post.

9.Humans: Humans are often the source of major risks that we face, from human error, failure, insufficient training, and the like.  Incompetence, ignorance, corruption, greed, and egotism are all observed and put society at risk. Terrorism and other forms of intentional harm now are a permanent feature. The risks of human inadequacy extend to management and organization (e.g., lack of risk awareness or safety culture) and to geopolitics and economic management.

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Critical Lessons from Coronavirus Pandemic

·  Undertake preparatory testing of systems and procedures;

·  Ensure adequate supplies of equipment and material and mechanisms for sharing capacities;

·  Deploy an early warning system connecting all levels of service and all geographies;

·  Take Fast, Early, and Coordinated Action;

·  Provide transparency and information sharing;

·  Coordinate action throughout the international health infrastructure;

·  Institute effective mechanisms for dealing with community transmission: testing, tracing, isolation

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Improving Resilience by Managing Risks

Managing risks involves understanding their nature and sources, the dynamics of their expression, and their consequences, reducing the likelihood of their occurrence and preparing in case they do, and instituting mechanisms for improving risk management from understanding and sharing experience. Risk management also involves being prepared to address risks that are not (yet) well understood. Given the variety of risks as set forth above, there is not a single structure that can manage them all. Some risks such as proliferation of weapons of mass destruction are necessarily managed by national governments and intergovernmental bodies, others best managed by local authorities. At a minimum, coordinated approaches that connect local to regional, national, and intergovernmental structures have the potential to deliver effective management at least cost and exposure.  A set of interlinked tools could address risks using an “Anticipate, Act and Learn” approach:

1.   Anticipate: Develop and deploy common protocols for anticipating and assessing vulnerabilities (procedural and physical infrastructure for responding to emergencies and regular appraisal of preparedness). Take steps to minimize specific, identified risks (see the following section).

2.   Act: Develop and deploy common protocols for addressing emergencies (coordination of services, prioritization, information gathering and sharing, how to act when communications or instructions from central authorities fail); and

3.   Learn: Develop and deploy guidelines on how to learn the lessons of a crisis (including rebuilding post crises and better anticipation of the next crises).

The Anticipate-Act-Learn model is intended to improve the resilience of societies in the face of the range of risks and emergencies that characterise the modern world. The ultimate objective would be to institute city/national/regional structures that comprise a connected network with common approaches and vocabulary tailored to local circumstances. A number of these structures exist today, but they are not comprehensive and they are not fully integrated and coordinated in a global risk management infrastructure.

Whether or not a specific structure addresses a specific risk would depend on the nature of the risk. A network of city-level resilience centres would support national and international action in the face of disease, shortages of food, water, and other vital commodities, protection of critical energy and communication infrastructure, and the other risks that have city-level relevance (for example, local pollution, natural disasters, and the like). The city resilience centres would coordinate with national and international structures to ensure proper preparation, response, coordination, and feedback. They would also engage with national and regional authorities to address how to repair the social fabric of cities (e.g., social safety nets such as loss of employment, health, security, with focus on vulnerable people).  The centres would prepare for situations by exploring their overall economic impact and by conceiving resilient urban infrastructure (such as transport, urban planning, energy use, food availability, distribution and waste, housing provision and conditions, public services, ‘smart’ and innovative solutions, standards, innovative financing mechanisms).

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Secure and affordable electric power supply is necessary for proper functioning of a modern economy. All segments of housing, commerce, industry, transport, communications, health services, and other critical services depend on secure and reliable supply of electricity. Reliable power supply is needed as well for proper functioning of other energy infrastructure including gas, oil, and other key infrastructure and of other economy segments such as water supply that depend, for example, on electric motors and pumps. In the worst cases, failure of power systems can result in significant black outs, human fatalities, and economic costs. In the long run extended unavailability of electricity would result in the destruction and eventual collapse of modern economic and social life. Hence the phrase “critical energy infrastructure” is appropriate. Assuring power supply requires that adequate generating capacity and reliable transmission and distribution be available (except in the case of distributed generation models). In the case of failure of power supply, there needs to be prepared and coordinated action among municipal service providers – police, fire, hospitals, communications, utilities, and the like – to ensure public safety and to address the root causes of the failure.

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Improving Resilience by Moderating Risks

An important element in managing risks, as noted above, is taking reasonable precautions to prevent them from occurring in the first place. It is increasingly important to understand the human behaviors that cause or exacerbate risks. As the saw goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. To minimize or eliminate risks, the following proactive steps could make an important contribution to risk management:

1.    Reduce or manage dependence on complex networks for basic human needs such as food, water, energy (see box), communications, mobility.

·  Reduce consumption by improving efficiencies and productivity

·  Invest in redundancy and systems that can accommodate technical and human failure.

·  Localize needs and disintermediate the centralized supply chain

2.     Reduce the environmental footprint of human activity

·  Use clean, low carbon fuels and energy with environmental mitigation

·  Build smart, resilient, and regenerative cities and communities

·  Adapt corporate compensation to reflect social, environmental, and economic goals in addition to profits and share prices

·  Build products and systems for longevity rather than obsolescence and waste

·  Protect and serve natural capital

[1] UNDRR, OECD, WHO, NRCI, WEF, and others all have annual Global Risk Assessments.