“There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” (Lenin)
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no more.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”
“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”
A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens, 1847)
These quotations and the title of this essay, are intended to reflect the predicament of our times. This, in turn, reflects upon our ability to manage disaster. Key words to bear in mind are 'context' and 'foresight'.
A Time of Normal Abnormality
Only once before in my life have I lived in a period of serious existential threat. That was in 1963 when the Cuban missile crisis took place. At ten years old I was too young to understand what was happening but the climate of extreme tension and fear was something I understood only too well. I remember it with absolute clarity. Now, we face two existential threats ('natural' and bellicose), thanks to the acts and the ideologies of the immoral and misguided people who govern us.
Considering the present state of the world, 'rationality' should be a very useful key word, but what can we do about the fact that many of the primary decision makers use an entirely different definition of rationality to the one that any scholar or scientist--indeed, any rational person--would espouse? As academics, we are taught to believe that there is only one reality and we must use our best attempts at objectivity to understand it. We are now forced to recognise that there are multiple realities. Paradoxically, that which is formally not true is nevertheless a concrete phenomenon if enough people believe it. Hence, erroneous notions cannot be wished away. Their impact is too great to ignore. This is a major change: indeed, it is a fundamental upheaval in modern life.
"The past doesn't reflect the future" is a very interesting philosophical concept. "The future doesn't reflect the past" is somewhat more banal. It is rather like "Man bites dog" is news, but "dog bites man" is not. Either way, the lack of continuity is a huge challenge for anyone who is trying to make sense of the modern world. For those of us in the 'knowledge industry' we must beware. In the academic world it is business as usual. In the so-called 'real world' it is not.
Despite adherence to academic 'comfort zones', can we say that the current predicament is causing a paradigm change? In the first place, Thomas Kuhn's structure of scientific revolutions theory, although it contains the seeds of truth, is something of a convenient fiction. Secondly, we must beware of using the word 'unprecedented'. In disaster risk reduction Taleb's black swan has become extinct and its ecological niche has been filled by the red herring. In other words, almost all developments have some kind of precedent. Hence, the black swan idea easily becomes an excuse for not thinking about things more profoundly. Finally, is what is coming a paradigm, and, if so, is it really replacing what came before? There are powerful developments, particularly in information technology, but their impact is diffuse rather than paradigmatic.
There are two beliefs that are prevalent but naive and untenable. One is that all we need to do is provide the information and decision makers will thank us profusely and implement our recommendations. There are many reasons why they do not. In this post-truth world, we see the almost universal rise of irrationality. Alternatively, it is a form of rationality that is so detached from any secure moral foundation that it seems to us to be irrational. The other is that technology will save the world. It has that potential, but it is currently the source of many of the world's problems. The eminent sociologist Henry Quarantelli wrote prophetically in 1997 "Technology leads a double life: that which its makers intended and that which they did not intend."
Let us examine one of the keys to the current malaise. Foresight tells us that in Europe the root of many problems lies in the cost of housing. Inflation in rents and property prices has had many negative effects. For instance:-
- it reduces people's disposable incomes as significant proportions of their financial resources must go into paying rents or mortgages
- it reduces the quality of housing and the diversity of functions and services in cities
- it increases poverty and homelessness
- it contributes substantially to rising inequity (the gap between the rich and the poor) and spreads deprivation.
There is a well-founded fear that the shear expense of living in cities will, not only massively increase support for authoritarian political parties, with the abandonment of democratic values, but will also lead to violent unrest that could spread across the continent. It is notable that most governments have done little to solve the problem. Lisbon, for example, has gone from being the cheapest capital city in Europe to being among the three most expensive, effectively pricing out many long-term residents. This is at least partly the result of Portuguese government policy on attracting new residents and promoting tourism. London, it is said, would be a very resilient city were it not for the high cost of living there, much of which stems from exorbitant rents and high property prices. One solution that is being tried out is to build large numbers of new houses in eminently floodable areas. Meanwhile, the construction industry proceeds with 'land-banking', the acquisition of land zoned for urbanisation without building anything on it. Land hoarding of this kind drives up prices by artificially creating scarcity. When housing is built it is usually the luxury kind, as this produces larger profits than those derived from building ordinary vernacular housing.
Climate change is already causing substantial increases in natural hazard impacts: heatwaves, floods, storms, wildfires, and so on. With high property prices the cost of these events is magnified. Hence, we may regard the housing market as an externality, or contextual factor, regarding the fight to create resilience against natural hazards (or indeed against any major hazards and threats). This highlights the need to think widely when analysing future trends and their outcomes.
It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the pace of change in the contemporary world, but it is also offering us an ultimatum. You make sense of the current situation (our predicament) or you succumb to it. To understand is to resist. It is a form of inoculation.
Disasters, Fundamental Values and the Third Decade of the 21st Century
Never has so much been destroyed for so many, by so few. For more than half a century wealth has systematically been redistributed from the poor to the rich. As a result, cost-cutting has been given a higher priority than capacity building. Hence, the 'tragedy of the commons' is more about their disappearance than it is about their lack of ownership. The first problem is one of squandering precious resources. For example, 23 years of war in Afghanistan cost the lives of 71,000 civilians and 69,000 Afghan soldiers, 2,448 American soldiers and 455 British military personnel. In monetary terms it cost 2,261 billion US dollars, all to no lasting effect. Moreover, there was a time when warfare primarily killed soldiers and other members of armed forces. Not any more. Nowadays it primarily kills civilians, and principally women and children, as we see in Gaza.
The existence of 2,100 billionaires is another form of squandering. During the Covid-19 pandemic they increased their net wealth by 24 per cent per annum while ordinary people suffered deprivation. Moreover, global inflation contributes massively to the assets of the super-wealthy. Hence it is not surprising that more than seven trillion USD of private wealth is hidden away in the world's 87 tax havens.
Secondly, we have to contend with the 'post-truth' age. We live in a world in which (as in 1938) the most potent force is the outright lie. The second most potent force is credulity. How can science and learning (i.e., universities) combat this? They are in thrall to the producers of these things. What we see developing in the United States is simply a bigger, cruder example of what is going on in the rest of the world. It is a world led by the powerful, rich people who have no morality, ethics, compassion, or sense of fairness. Paradoxically, greater equality would provide a more comfortable living environment for the rich as well as the poor, but powerful forces have resisted the kind of taxation and public administration that would provide it. Capital is ultra-mobile, while strenuous efforts are being made to limit the mobility of labour under the false premise that this is the source of impoverishment.
This change has occurred in 80 years. The Second World War effectively destroyed the political power of capital over labour. The aftermath brought it back.
These, then, are the components of authoritarianism:-
- leaders who are criminals, delinquents and kleptocrats
- heroes who are vacuous celebrities
- manipulators who are billionaires
- information which is fantasy and falsehood
- ideology that is toxic
- democracy that is hollowed out
- our fellow human beings who would rather look at screens than at us
- our environment is on the slippery slope
- our humanitarianism, the little that is left of it, has been weaponised.
All of this is taking place against a background of cultural change that involves the increasing commodification of values. Useful descriptors include 'weaponised oversight', intimidation dressed up as transparency, 'electoral autocracy' and avoidance of due process. As the 1930s and 1940s taught is this sort of regime can be applied with deadly efficiency, but it is also dysfunctional. The result is a pervasive and destructive phenomenon that we can call a 'trust deficit'. It has massive implications for public safety. Full democracy affords people unbiased access to information and the freedom to act. The decline of democratic institutions, a marked phenomenon in the modern world, leads to a loss of trust in them and a tendency to disbelieve what people are told by authority. Nowadays, only one in nine countries can be described as fully democratic, and even there the level of accountability to the electorate is highly variable. Democracy in the world is in full retreat.
Let us take an example. Politicians, by and large, do not like to define ‘welfare’. Nevertheless, the concept is at the heart of disaster risk reduction. It should mean the provision of assistance to enable individual people to achieve a decent minimum standard of living, including adequate food, shelter and healthcare. It also involves notions of personal and public safety. If welfare were defined in relation to many different activities of government, and the rules that governments set, they would have to honour that definition and all to often they do nothing of the sort.
Welfare is thus another concept that defies definition in the context of disasters. We have the universal principles of right to life, safety, freedom from want, and so on, but we do not have universal concepts for applying them. The result is something that we might term blind ideology.
Once we had a consensus that Fascism is a bad ideology, and this viewpoint was based on 80 million deaths that stemmed from Fascism's rise in the early 20th century. Once we had a broad consensus on the need to find and respect truth. We had no 'culture wars', or at least not of the type we see now. Once we had viable international mechanisms for settling disputes. What we now have is the approaching end of the Second Age of Enlightenment.
This period was based on the extraordinary growth of scientific and intellectual endeavour and its positive impact on living standards. It created a global consensus on basic ethics, as embodied in the UN's 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. True, not everything in the garden was rosy, but compare these developments with the backsliding that is now underway:-
- abandonment of the principle that we must seek and adhere to the truth
- crass manipulation of public perception and opinion
- loss of faith in science as a means of solving problems
- technology as a form of ideology and a substitute for clear thinking
- legitimacy obtained by raw power rather than competency
- demise of higher education and, indeed, education in general
- resort to artificial [un]-intelligence as a substitute for skill development, thinking and reasoning
- so-called 'culture wars' and the blind acceptance of ideologies that are fundamentally harmful
- the "post-truth" world:
- the spread of lies, "alternative facts", unverifiable theories, etc.
- disrespect for objectivity
- anti-intellectualism
- the coarsening of debate.
· The collapse of the Second Age of Enlightenment not only destabilises systems, but dissolves common norms of understanding across a wide stretch of human experience and knowledge. That, coupled with the belief that we can technologise ourselves to prosperity, is a dangerous mix.
International Mechanisms
In 1945 it was recognised that a global organisation was required in order to mediate disputes, promote peace and lay down the fundamental principles on which human life should be organised. The League of Nations (1920-1946) had set the scene, but ultimately it failed and was absorbed into the United Nations Organisation (founded 1945). Has the UN failed too? It has undoubtedly become weaker in recent years. As its authority has diminished, so has the risk of global conflict increased. If it has failed, the fault is not so much that of the UN itself, but of its member states.
When we look at the plight of the constituent organisations of the UN, the situation is equally bleak. The World Health Organisation, for example, is battling against a breakdown in international cooperation that is far beyond its capacity to control. Regarding the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the mid-term report of the Sendai Framework for DRR states unequivocally that "progress has stalled and in some cases has reversed." In the most optimistic view it is notable that only half of the world's countries are actually making any effort to implement the SFDRR.
This begs the question of whether the Sendai Framework is the right vehicle to promote disaster risk reduction. These are some questions we might ask of it:
- do we need it?
- if we do not need it, what would be the alternatives?
- why is it ignored in rich countries?
- what is the value of the framework if it only applies to developing countries?
- why has "progress stalled and in some cases gone backwards"?
- what if it is nothing more than a gigantic bureaucratic exercise?
- why do countries find it so difficult to confront disaster risk and what exactly does the SFDRR do to reduce that obstacle?
Perhaps the key to the problem lies in the fact that the Sendai Framework requires that disaster risk be treated as if it were a neutral threat. It is not, and there is little appetite for treating it as such. In official and executive quarters, attitudes to disaster reduction depend on sophisticated matters of context, which will be discussed and codified below. For the present, suffice it to say that DRR is often regarded as dispensable and there may even be hostility to it by those who wish to promote a radical agenda that fights against any agenda backed by science.
The collapse of international humanitarian aid is a highly significant development in contemporary world affairs. A former leader of USAid, Jeremy Konyndyk, stated “We are witnessing in the United States one of the greatest failures of basic governance and basic leadership in modern times.” With the current intense interest in curbing migration, international aid has long been seen as one way of achieving that aim. When aid is cut, this argument goes out of the window. We now face a situation in which Draconian efforts are made to stop international migration while the leaders who promote them are busy creating conditions in which migration is unavoidable. For rich countries, migration is probably the only way of compensating for low birth rates and their potentially devastating effects upon economies.
Resilience
We now live in the age of so-called 'persistent disruptive stressors'. These give rise to enduring polycrises. These in turn are phenomena that have cascading effects. One might legitimately argue that what is now going on in the United States is a cascading crisis with global reach and implications.
Resilience is a necessary objective and has the advantage of being a positive word in a world of negative phenomena. However, in theoretical, if not practical, terms it is a mirage. This is because the resilience of systems depends on the property of homeostasis, that when the system receives a shock it will innately seek to return to equilibrium, whether or not it is able to do so. This may either be the equilibrium of a pre-existing system state ('bounce back') or that of a new system state ('bounce forward'). The problem is that we are living in an age in which there is no equilibrium. The systems are strongly trended. One can liken this to a game of football in which the goalposts are constantly being moved. Indeed, they are now moving faster than the players can run.
In some respects, resilience is like cholesterol. There is good and bad. It depends on whose resilience is involved. It does not follow that resilience, if achieved, is the levelling-up panacea of a good outcome for all, especially if it benefits the wealthy and powerful rather than the underdog.
The opposite of resilience is, very approximately, vulnerability, and vulnerability is the essence of risk. Hence, it would probably be a better strategy to concentrate on reducing vulnerability rather than increasing resilience. The extent to which the former would automatically create the latter is debatable, as a person, community or society can simultaneously be both resilient and vulnerable, but in different ways. Another weakness of the resilience concept is that both security and resilience have no intrinsic value. Their value is in what they protect. This is akin to the paradox of vulnerability: it only exists in relation to a threat or hazard, not in its own right. Hence, it is like friction, only manifest when it is mobilised. This explains in great measure why vulnerability (and perhaps also resilience) is difficult to measure and is thus something of an illusive property.
In terms of creating resistance to polycrisis, one should ask whether such a thing is an amalgam of crises or several overlapping events that require different approaches to tackle them? During the Covid-19 pandemic there were three major earthquakes. The necessary response to these differed very substantially from the response to the disease. Indeed, the two were effectively incompatible.
Community
Among the amorphous or heterogeneous mass of humanity there is a need to identify something with which one can interact. Hence, we have the concept of community, but what is a community? It is variously a mechanism for social interaction, a means by which people exhibit and defend a common interest, a vehicle for solidarity and a source of common identity. Communities, apparently, exist to solve people’s problems, but do they?
The first issue with community is that the concept has no characteristic or natural spatial scale. Are we talking about a street, a city district, an entire town or city, or relations between people in places that are widely distant from each other? How small or large can a community be? Does community have an optimal size? There are no very clear answers to these questions, or, if there are, they apply only to very specific circumstances and are not transferable without modification.
The second issue is that communities, if they exist, are not necessarily therapeutic entities. A strong ‘sense of community’ might be directed towards, for example, distributing and selling illegal drugs, or ensuring that other ‘communities’ lose out on anything good that is going. A community may be divided into ‘armed camps’ or factions to which people cleave in order to differentiate themselves from their neighbours and compete with the other factions. Elite capture may dominate the agenda of communities. If it does, this undermines the whole concept, as it takes away the sense of self-determination that gives meaning to ‘community’. Finally, if there are communities, then they can breed ‘communities within communities’, such as disaster subcultures. This complicates any attempt to identify and work with communities.
In 1987 the then British Prime-Minister Margaret Thatcher said in an interview “Too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the government’s job to cope with it.' They are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing!” This rather extreme view is something of a definition of conservatism and it defines the primacy of individualism over collective action.
INDIVIDUALISM <—> COLLECTIVE ACTION
self-interest solidarity
To state this, however, is not to condone such an interpretation. Margaret Thatcher had not contracted COVID-19. If she had, then the view of collective action might have been different as it is the only means by which such diseases can be brought under control.
Be careful about what you expect from the concept of community. You may need to create the community before you can utilise it to spread disaster risk reduction.
The Enduring Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic
Mention of the COVID-19 pandemic reminds us that it was the mother of all cascading disasters and perhaps the most pervasive peacetime disaster in the last hundred years. In the United Kingdom it claimed at least 226,977 lives, up to 20% could have been probably have been saved by better preparedness
A viral pandemic is half a medical and public health problem (including psychological effects) and half a socio-economic problem. In that sense, for emergency planning purposes, we can put it together with other forms of disaster or major civil contingency.
We classify pandemics along with other non-medical and non-bellicose disasters because they are at least 50% non-medical phenomena. The civil protection aspects largely consist of the following:-
applying the emergency plan or plans to the emergency
communicating between responders, emergency services, technical services and governmental agencies
communicating with the public and with particular groups of beneficiaries
logistics, involving procurement, storage, distribution, stocking of goods, and possibly also accelerated manufacture of goods
in connection with that, ensuring continuity and maintenance of supply-chains
compiling, sharing and utilising the common operating picture in order to promote situational awareness among all responding agencies
ensuring interoperability
responding to exigencies as they occur
managing field forces, including voluntary organisations
As a principle, civil protection works when participatory democracy is involved. Given that in containing Covid-19 some good results were obtained under (relatively) restrictive conditions, does this belie the principle? Is disobedience healthy? Does it undermine collective action or invigorate it? By and large, compliance with restrictive measures stopped the pandemic from being worse that it actually was. Collective action paid off, whereas individualism tended to worsen the problem. Nevertheless, in many places the pandemic was a catalyst (or vehicle) for fermenting problems of corruption, mismanagement and inequality. The lessons of Covid about vulnerable people and groups were loud and clear, but that does not mean that they were heeded.
Science and technology got us out of the pandemic, but they have always been a double-edged sword, as we see with the benefits and drawbacks of information technology.
The New Challenges of Information Technology
Successful emergency managers do not use algorithms. The basis of the information technology algorithm is a model of reality. It emulates the human process of learning from reality by storing experiences and analysing them to bring out regularities that can be relied on to understand present developments and anticipate future ones. Emergency managers do this, but experience tells them that changes, large or small, in conditions on the ground can lead to very large changes, even proliferating change, in outcomes and developments. These could easily be outside the scope of most IT algorithms and possibly outside the scope of the 'innate' algorithm that the emergency manager carries in his or her head. It is nevertheless necessary to adapt to these changes. That is why situational awareness and the dissemination of the common operating picture are so important in the management of sudden-impact emergencies.
Rather than being blinded by the glitz of artificial [un]intelligence, we should remember that it is not a substitute for thinking, and above all no alternative to clear thinking. While recognising that AI is capable of bringing massive benefits, it does have the following drawbacks:-
- excessive demand for electricity and cooling water
- job losses
- theft of intellectual property and its effect on creativity
- deskilling by automation (delegation of learning and self-improvement to a machine)
- creation of false or inaccurate text, images and videos
- it cannot adequately distinguish good from bad, acceptable from unacceptable
- the credulity and maleability of people who use AI
- can it distinguish between true and false information, given that the latter abounds?
- follows the agenda of money-makers and mega-corporations, not that of ordinary people
Economically speaking, there are weak signals that the AU bubble may well burst as the dot-com one did.
The 2025 UK Government Survey of Public Risk Perception notes that 39% of respondents say they get their emergency (risk, hazard and threat) information from social media. Noting the role of fake news, conspiracy theories, deep-fakes, and so on, one has to hope for the best. In 1963 Marshall McLuhan wrote that "the medium is the message". Nowadays we can say that the medium is the conspiracy theory - or perhaps the 'alternative fact'. Technology has become a narcotic.
Foresight would tell us to consider the long-term implications of artificial intelligence, not merely its short-term impact.
Context
We can define 'context' as the social, economic, cultural, psychological and environmental milieu that surrounds disaster risk and to some degree interacts with it. If necessary, we can disaggregate different types of context. However, overall, context should be considered as the sum of elements that have no direct causal relationship with disaster but, paradoxically, are (or should be) essential to any attempt to explain it.
A binary view of context divides it into that which enables change and that which inhibits or prohibits it, where 'change' is here interpreted as any development that is positive and productive in terms of disaster risk reduction.
Here is a simple, indeed rudimentary, classification of the forms of context:-
associative: social, political, community/communal
lucrative: economic
technological: cyber, scientific
philosophical: cultural, ideological, historical, psychological
ambient: environmental, institutional, healthcare
While it may be difficult to dissociate particular contexts into individual categories, it is hoped that the classification will help illuminate the facets of a multi-dimensional problem. We need to devote much more attention to understanding context. If we do not, it may rise up and overwhelm us, as well as neutralising our efforts to create a safer world.
The 'window of opportunity' is the name we give to an alignment of favourable elements of context. The post-disaster window of opportunity opens when the public, struck by the disaster, and the decision makers, sensitive to public opinion, realise that they must do something about continuing and future disaster risk. It follows that we need to be sensitive to context in order to exploit, benignly, any opportunity that it affords us to promote disaster risk reduction.
Conclusion: Foresight and the Future of Disaster Risk Reduction
We have grand challenges in disaster risk reduction:-
- to adapt to changes in a volatile world
- to disseminate the concepts of safety and security
- to create and use foresight (as rigorously as possible)
- to develop a rigorous methodology for emergency planning and management
On a theoretical level what is needed is a fusion of European relativism and Anglo-Saxon pragmatism. On a practical level we need to exercise foresight. This is not an exercise in predicting the future. Instead it should be a rigorous, structured effort to examine the range of possible future outcomes. It can thus produce an envelope or suite of scenarios, ranging from the plausible worst case to the best one. It can use counter-factual analysis of past events, past threats and hazards even, and it can provide the raw material for emergency planning and emergency decision making. To sum up: "hindsight, insight, foresight, oversight".
In conclusion, we are faced with a series of eminently solvable major problems. We have the know-how, the technology and the organisation to solve them, completely and in record time. Why does it not happen? Power and ideology are the answer. Neither of these two qualities is fundamentally bad. Instead, they are both neutral. But like many inherently neutral phenomena they can be pulled in either direction: benign or malign.
Acknowledgement
I thank Prof. James Kendra for some useful inspiration.
