Four Questions About the Covid-19 Pandemic

1. What are, and have been, the key challenges in coping with the Covid-19 pandemic?

The first challenge is to understand the behaviour of an emerging disease caused by a new variant of a virus. This concerns its infectiousness, mode of transmission, lethality, symptoms and effects, mutation, longevity on various kinds of surface, and so on. Information on these characteristics takes a long time to assemble, as at the start the virus is new and unknown, its relationship with the host population is unknown and its ability to disseminate is also unknown.

Viral pandemics can have impacts that are as significant in the socio-economic field as they are in epidemiology and viral medicine. The epidemiological approach to the virus involves constantly tracking the progress of the disease and applying measures where it flares up. It also involves promoting appropriate forms of behaviour, principally the need to practise good hygiene, physical distancing and sanitisation of environments. Hospitals need to develop very substantial surge capacity and greatly increase their infection control measures. This may involve deploying field hospitals and using the resources of military medicine.

In the socio-economic sphere, welfare suddenly becomes a vitally important issue. Basic services depend on the work of people who are in the front line of infection, such as nurses, doctors, carers, cleaners and delivery drivers. They will need a constant supply of adequate personal protective equipment. Huge changes in the pattern of demand and supply will occur during a pandemic. Sectors such as travel, hospitality, tourism, retail, the arts and entertainment will suffer closures and reorganisations. Income support will be vitally important. Lockdowns will seriously affect people's mental health.

Specific challenges involve safeguarding the residents and staffs of care homes. Covid-19 is far more lethal for frail elderly people than it is for other categories of the population. Outbreaks in care homes need to be prevented by extraordinary distancing, sanitising and protection measures. Provision of continuity of care for people with non-Covid illnesses is also a major problem. When hospital capacity is absorbed by large influxes of people suffering from Covid, the tendency is to defer treatment of patients with other illnesses. This can lead to widespread failure to diagnose and treat life-threatening and seriously debilitating conditions. It can also lead to treatment that fails because it is applied too late in the development of illnesses such as fast-growing cancers. Finally, Covid-19 can have a disproportionate impact on people with disabilities. As the range of disabilities is very wide, the effects are highly varied and they require a variety of different solutions and remedies.

Amid all the risks associated with a pandemic the policing function is important. In the interests of safeguarding the entire population, restrictions on personal freedom are necessary. These need to be measured, proportional to the risk and applied with fairness and a degree of tolerance.

2. Can we draw on expertise in the field of disaster risk management?

We can regard Covid-19 as a 'wave-disaster'. It is characterised by fluxes of infection and a wide geographical spread of 'flare-ups', which leads to a constantly changing, highly dynamic situation. Under such circumstances, disaster risk management is vitally important, especially as one is dealing with a medical emergency and a social, economic and psychological one.

It is necessary to understand people's perceptions of and attitudes to risk. Human behaviour must be studied and comprehended under the unusual conditions of lockdown, and amidst the far-reaching changes in employment, personal freedom, the risk of illness and the morale of people who suffer disruption to their normal lives.

Although the medical, virological and epidemiological aspects of a pandemic are obviously vital and extremely complex, as an emergency and disaster, the outbreak must be managed with many of the tools and precepts that apply to other kinds of crisis. It is important to understand the relative nature of risk in geographical terms, with respect to the co-occurrence of different kinds of risk, and so as to prioritise risk management interventions.

Emergency planning is an essential tool in the response to a pandemic. Planning is more a process than an outcome. It helps anticipate needs and therefore create the conditions in which preparations can be made to satisfy them. Emergency response has three ingredients: plans, procedures and improvisation. The plans orchestrate the procedures. They ensure that responsibilities are fully assigned, that participants in the response have well-defined roles and that needs are identified in time to supply them. As all emergencies contain some final, irreducible uniqueness, improvisation cannot be ruled out. However, it needs to be reduced to a minimum. Otherwise, the result is tantamount to negligence, a failure to anticipate needs in time to prepare for them. Detailed scenarios of a major viral pandemic have existed since the mid-2000s. They gave the opportunity to recognise what would need to be done during a viral emergency, what equipment and preparations would be needed, and now society would abruptly change.

Communication is a vital element of the pandemic response. It should be honest, open, transparent, measured, consistent, frequent and clear. Moreover, leaders must lead by example, as this is an essential means of maintaining the consistency in communication. There is no virtue in minimising the problems associated with facing up to the pandemic. There should be no exaggeration, distortion or concealment of the facts. Building a relationship of trust with the recipients of information, particularly with the general population, is the only way of inducing people to follow sensible regulations.

3. What should be the role of civil protection on a national and international level in this context?

No matter how large they are, all disasters are local events. The theatre of operations is invariably local. Because of the vast scale of the resources needed to manage a viral pandemic, the response must be national. Moreover, the global nature of the crisis places emphasis on international coordination of the response: sharing data, following other countries' good practices, learning from the experience of other countries, and practising international solidarity, for example in access to vaccines, palliative drugs and the fruits of research. However, the pandemic must be managed at the local level. This means that coordination between national, regional and local authorities needs to be strong and extensive. Higher levels of government need fully to support local efforts to bring the pandemic under control.

Countries need to have good, robust, extensive civil protection systems with well-thought-out national coordination systems and a strong local presence throughout the country. These systems are usually established by the passing of a national law that sets up and defines the system and specifies how it will function. Flanking civil protection, there needs to be a national higher institute of health, or similar organisation designed to manage the public health elements of a disease.

In all disasters, there is a tension between centralisation and devolution. In most countries, an excessively centralised response to the pandemic will be less than optimal because it will not promote responses that are sufficiently tailored to local realities. On the other hand, local authorities should not be abandoned as they struggle to bring the disease under control. Local services understand local conditions much better than external forces do, and for this reason they need to have a lead role, and executive authority, in managing the event, but they need to be endowed with adequate resources to be able to do so.

4. What important lessons are to be learned?

The first lesson of the Covid-19 pandemic is that there was a need to develop and take heed of international monitoring and to put measures in place quickly. Prompt reaction to the threat and the evolving situation was capable of saving many lives. This was contingent upon having plans that would enable the reaction to take place.

The second lesson is that there could be a gap, an abyss even, between a pandemic plan and its ability to be activated. For example, one of the most essential aspects to be planned and managed is the supply chain network. Personal protective equipment, palliative drugs, ventilators and other materials and supplies needed to be stockpiled and the stockpiled maintained over time. If this could not be done, there needed to be pre-arranged agreements to manufacture equipment and supplies very rapidly and predetermined logistical supply-lines. Improvisation of supply and logistics could prove to be lethal. Blockages, chronic shortages and imbalances would be inevitable.

The third lesson is the importance of regional and local approaches to managing the crisis, coordinated and harmonised (or at least mediated) nationally. Many national initiatives have failed or have proved to be inappropriate or wrongly calibrated for particular local areas. While one has to avoid interregional chaos, highly centralised command and supply is also ineffective.

The fourth lesson is that communication must be clear, consistent, honest, open, transparent and frequent. The problems must not be obscured or minimised. The response must be fair and equitable. Authorities and politicians must work hard to build up a relationship of trust with the public. The aim should be to build a consensus about responsible behaviour and sharing the burden.

Covid-19 has produced an existential crisis, not in the sense that the existence of the human race is threatened, but because it calls into question the very bases of modern life. Welfare, equity and the right to life, employment and basic necessities are all strongly implicated. Fighting the pandemic is a matter of collective action. It requires collective effort and discipline. Institutional and political responses must take this fully into account.

The "prison of experience" - the Italian case

 Over the last decade, two very influential books in Italy have been La Casta ("The Caste") by Sergio Rizza and Gian Antonio Stella (2007) and Gomorra: viaggio nell'impero economico e nel sogno di dominio della camorra ("Gomorrah: Journey into the Economic Empire and Dreams of Domination of the Camorra") by Roberto Saviano (2006). La Casta describes, on a detailed and individual level, the privileges and power of the political class. It is a handbook on corruption. Gomorra details the connection between the political class and the most economically successful of the four mafias in Italy. The response of the population to this is to feel trapped in a situation in which there are no democratic alternatives. The system was put in place in 1947 by the Americans and rigidly reinforced during the Cold War. The effect of this has been to fossilise, or perhaps indurate, it so that it even survived the collapse of Christian Democracy and the so-called "First Republic", which was induced by the end of the Cold War and bipartisan polarisation.

This explains the very substantial rise of the Five Star movement, a political party based on protest against the system. Unfortunately, Five Star does not have disaster prevention in its agenda.

With regard to disasters Catholicism has a positive side vested in its emphasis on charity and service. Its negative side is that it tends to induce fatalism. If one is Hyblean, female and of a certain age, the Virgin Mary holds the key to understanding earthquakes: if one is Sabine, it may be St Tammaro - and so on. Prayer and supplication are cathartic but do not add up to disaster risk reduction.

Another factor is a severely practical one: the constraints of multiple ownership of property. The historical tendency for people and families in the Mediterranean to live in very close proximity stems from the Roman (or possibly Iron Age) oppida, a defensible site on high ground. With modern demand for space, the population density of historical settlements in Italy is 10-40 per cent of what it was a century ago before mass emigration took hold. The modern equivalent is the reinforced concrete apartment block. In any case, living cheek by jowl is still the norm. Yet in a condominium it is routine to encounter opposition to spending money on structural reinforcement. For example, my second home is in a building 700 years old, located in a highly seismic area, and that has five owners. Four of us had to threaten one of the owners with prosecution in order to obtain payment for essential repairs to the roof. Seismic retrofitting is out of the question unless those who want it are prepared to pay on behalf of those who could not care less.

Added to this is the effect of the performance of dense urban fabrics in earthquakes and other sudden-impact disasters. Collapse at the top of the hill brings down 'innocent' buildings down the slope in a sort of landslide of rubble. This is a particular problem in historical hill villages. Even if buildings are not damaged, they may be inaccessible as a result of being surrounded by damaged and precarious masonry. This was the case for many residents of the centre of L'Aquila city after the 2009 earthquake.

The net effect of these considerations may amount to what Kates (1971) referred to as the "prison of experience", which induces a sense of impotency rather than empowerment. This is triangulated by three points: (a) the difficulty of obtaining any positive change from the political class, and the concomitant effect of organised crime on corruption, which maintains the 'alternative' economy in a dominant position over the official one; (b) a feeling that forces beyond one's control govern the likelihood of experiencing damage or injury in disasters; and (c) stonewalling, opposition to safety measures and lack of hazard perception by one's neighbours. These are some of the root causes of continued seismic vulnerability. They enable moderate earthquakes to cause major damage.

Reference

Kates, R.W. 1971. Natural hazards in human ecological perspective: hypotheses and models. Economic Geography 47: 428-51

Talk no. 4: Disasters, Resilience and the Tension of Opposites

Four Talks on Disaster Risk Reduction, no. 4

Disasters, Resilience and the Tension of Opposites

The word resilience, or resiliency, has a 500-year history in the English language. It stems from the Latin verb resilire, 'to recoil' or rebound. The first scientific use of the term occurred in the Edwardian era slightly more than a century ago, when it was applied in mechanics. A resilient material is one that, under an applied force, reacts with an optimum combination of strength and ductility. The strength enables it to resist the force and the ductility to deform in order to absorb some of the stress that is applied.

In the 1960s resiliency was first used to describe ecological systems that could resist shocks to their equilibrium. The term was applied in the sense of formal systems analysis. Twenty-five years later the concept came into common use in psychology, with particular reference to the ability of children to survive the trauma of conflict, disaster or family strife.

Resiliency became fashionable in disaster risk reduction only in the mid-2000s. By analogy with mechanics, a resilient society is one that is strong enough to resist the shock effect of disaster and flexible enough to adapt to those aspects that cannot be repulsed. The idea draws upon both the long tradition of building structural protection against natural disasters (dams, levees, anti-seismic housing, and so on) and 90 years of human ecological studies on how people and societies adapt to hazards.

One common misassumption about resiliency is that it simply means 'to bounce back', in the sense of recreating the conditions that prevailed before disaster struck. A much better idea is to "build back better", in which disaster becomes the opportunity to improve conditions beyond what they were before. In many parts of the world this is an imperative, and one hopes that disaster is not a brake on development, but the opportunity to further it by introducing more functional plans, better initiatives for renewal and an augmented culture of safety. One also hopes that this is is the case, not only in terms of physical protection, but also with respect to social and institutional development.

Gradually, the erosion of boundaries between disciplines and professions has led to a consensus that the answers to the problems posed by disasters need to be holistic. The sectoral approach has often created more problems than it has solved, for example, by encouraging development behind structural barriers that fail to offer adequate protection against floods, landslides, avalanches or tsunamis—in fact no structural measures ever offer 100 per cent protection. Indeed, without a holistic approach that develops measures in a variety of structural and non-structural domains, there may be a risk transfer effect, but not of the mutually beneficial kind. More likely it will transfer risk from where it is tractable to where it is intractable or cannot so easily be sustained.

Indeed, one of the most common forms of risk transfer involves the marginalisation of the poor and dispossessed. All evidence points to the fact that disasters tend to strengthen pre-existing power structures. Once the 'therapeutic community' of welfare and mutual assistance has evaporated, the social milieu that emerges tends to be a version of what was there before that exaggerates its own defects. For instance, after the December 1972 earthquake in Nicaragua, the rich and middle classes rebuilt their damaged property in six months: some of the poor and marginalised people of the city never rebuilt their homes at all. Hence, disasters are seldom about empowerment, even though they ought to be. They weaken the weak and strengthen the hand of the strong. In the Caribbean, for example, Hurricane Mitch set back development in some areas by twenty years, and it left plantation workers destitute as their employers switched production elsewhere and offered them no safety net. What was mere inconvenience to a multinational company was devastating to its employees.

It should be apparent from this discussion, and from much of what one reads about disaster, that it is a thing of light and shade. Indeed, the tension of opposites, the chiaroscuro of disaster, dominates the whole field. This is hardly a new predicament. In fact, perhaps without being aware of it, we still use the ancient Platonic notions of generatio and corruptio, creation and destruction. The Greeks had intended them primarily as expressions of small-scale cycles, by which, for example, mountains were elevated and their rocks gradually shattered and scoured away by erosion. Indeed, they saw the world as continuously locked in the dialectic of creation and destruction. The Mediæval thinker, on the other hand, was apt to impose a beginning and an end to the great cycles, and hence generatio gradually became equated with Genesis, and corruptio with the Day of Judgement and the ensuing extinction of the world in a final conflagration. Greeks who had been sceptical of Plato had interpreted his magnus annus (or Great Year) in this way, as one phase of growth and decay encompassing all life and human existence.

Despite our different perspective in the 21st century, that tension of opposites, generatio and corruptio, remains a part of our outlook.

In fact, sometimes the ancient Greek thinkers seem quintessentially modern. Consider, for example, Anaximander of Miletus, whose dates were  615 to 547 BCE. By a process of dispassionate observation of the world around him he raised the great questions: what is nature? What is the source of the confusion and change that we see around us, and how are we to reconcile it with the concept of eternal and absolute order? Almost 2,600 years later, if we knew the answers to these questions sufficiently well, we would probably know enough to bring the disasters problem fully under control.

Instead, we live in the New Baroque Era. True, history does not repeat itself, but it does make some close passes with respect to how it once was. The old Baroque period was distinguished by the tension of opposites. In Europe, the Ancien Régime began to crumble under the duress of technological and social change. Old certainties began to disappear. The 21st century has its absolutism, its barbarism and its perplexities, too. In both periods we can discern a struggle to come to terms with the rapidly shifting foundations of society.

I was much struck by the parallels between the Lisbon earthquake of November 1755 and the attacks on the United States in September 2001. In both cases, the heart of a great trading empire was suddenly, unexpectedly struck a cataclysmic, death-dealing blow on a calm, sunny morning. Even the visual parallels are striking: lofty buildings, with their repetitive fenestration, suddenly brought down, towers decapitated, dust plumes and crackling fires that consumed the wreckage. I have written in detail about the philosophical, social and symbolic similarities between the two disasters (see Disasters journal, 2002). Suffice it to say that in each case the shockwaves rippled out across society and led to consequences far beyond their points of origin—in time, in geography and in form of socio-economic mutation.

The Lisbon earthquake is widely held to have ushered in a darker period of history, in which the optimism of the Enlightenment was replaced by a black pessimism about the human condition and the future of society. Most probably, one cannot generalise so readily, such are the many points of view that need to be taken into account. However, continuing the parallel with modern times, it is true that there was a resurgence of militarism after the 2001 disasters, and one that could be directly connected to them. The attitude after Lisbon, when the human experience was suddenly revealed to be malevolent, was perhaps yet more authoritarian.

This brings be on to one of my favourite topics: the difference between civil defence and civil protection. The terms are often employed loosely. For example, the civil protection service of New Zealand is the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management. However, I believe it is useful and necessary to distinguish between the two forms of organisation. Civil defence, in its purest form, is a centralised, national, top-down service that is designed to protect a country against armed aggression. Originally, this was by other states, but latterly it has been practised by loosely organised ideological groups, possibly with state backing (one should not underestimate the importance in the modern era of proxy wars, however "asymmetric" they may be). Civil protection, sensu stricto, is a bottom-up, locally organised, federated system designed to protect the civilian population against natural and technological disasters. Some countries, for example Italy, have both systems clearly delineated, and in such cases they tend to complement, rather than conflict, with one another.

In organising a country or region to fight disasters (both in terms of crisis response and risk reduction), there is usually a gradual transition from military to civilian models. Information and communications technology is widely employed nowadays, and one of its effects is to flatten the chain of command. It is clear, moreover, that civil protection works best when it is allied with participatory governance.

Now according to the dictionary, 'governance' is nothing more than "the act of governing". However, for the term to mean anything in the context of disaster risk reduction, it must signify a common social process: representative democracy, but probably also a substantial dose of participatory democracy. One reason is that we need to induce people to assume more of their own risks (allowing for welfare, which I will discuss shortly), and another is that what is done to protect society needs to be based on approval by consensus.

From the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 to the San Francisco tremors and urban fire of 1906, citizens were summarily executed if they did not do what the authorities thought they should do. Authoritarianism in disaster aftermaths has not disappeared: indeed, leaders with strong personalities see it as an easy fix to complex problems—giving people a dose of what they need, whether or not they want it. However, in the last twenty or thirty years there has been much more discussion of ethics and equity than before, and the spotlight of instant publicity has fostered this trend.

At this point I think I might open a parenthesis by asking which was the first "modern" disaster? There are, of course, varying interpretations of this, and I can only offer the one that I favour. It was the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70, sometimes known as the Biafra war. A quite artificial famine was induced in the Nigerian state of Biafra as part of a 'scorched earth' policy against the rebels. This was the first time that television cameras reached the area during the crisis phase, filmed the human suffering in the raw and, with some ingenuity, played the footage on television news within a matter of hours. It was not real-time broadcasting, but it was a breakthrough that led inexorably to exactly that.

I might add that civil defence, in its modern form, probably began one morning in April 1937 at the Battle of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. It was the first concerted aerial bombardment in history. It may well have been the tipping point at which warfare started to reap a greater toll among civilians (particularly women and children) than among soldiers, which it now routinely does. The rudimentary attempts to protect the civilian population on the ground were to grow to fully-fledged systems of civil defence a few years later during the Second World War.

Origins apart, civil defence was the progenitor of civil protection. Hence it is tempting, and perhaps legitimate, to think in terms of an evolutionary process from one to the other. Is civil defence, perhaps, the darker reality and civil protection a more optimistic one in terms of the human condition? Is such an interpretation justified in terms of social, organisational and institutional evolution? Does evolution of any kind naturally bring us to a happier, more adjusted state? In this case, perhaps: civil defence is, after all, linked to warfare and conflict, while the raw material—more properly the core material—of civil protection tends to be a more morally neutral set of phenomena associated with natural disasters and unanticipated failures of technology. It is also the defence of civic values against any enemy, whether morally neutral or not.

"Man's inhumanity to man / Makes countless thousands mourn!" wrote Robert Burns in 1785. In that sense, it was inevitable that civil defence would never go away. Indeed, it could be regarded as the ethical face of warfare. Or could it?

The civil defence of the 1940s was an affair of tin hats and gas masks in canvas bags. Its operatives pulled survivors from the rubble of bomb-sites and found them makeshift accommodation. As the War was ending, the term 'iron curtain' was already being used to describe a situation that would vastly intensify once the threat of all-out nuclear conflict was fully appreciated. Civil defence in the post-War period was dominated by a series of preparations that were increasingly and demonstrably futile. If populations could survive nuclear war, what sort of world would they emerge into? Would there be a food chain at all? Would radioactive contamination wipe them out, person by person? Would the state have protected its people or only its élite? Would it have used civil defence to protect the élite against the people? We will never know, but there will always be doubts about the motives inherent in civil defence during the Cold War. In most countries it was a very secretive affair, and secrecy does not breed trust.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was one of the most symbolic moments in modern history. It led to a lapse in civil defence that, however, was anything but permanent. Evidence of this can be seen in the fact that the so-called "peace dividend", the economic "beating of swords into ploughshares", lasted only until about 1994. Terrorism has conveniently provided a new Cold War. In part this is justified by the mutation of proxy wars (as practised previously in Afghanistan and Africa, for instance) into proxy-based asymmetric conflict (as practised, once again, in Afghanistan, and also the Middle East and Asia, and periodically imported into the West). For the rest it represents the resurgence and reassertion of the cold warriors after their brief period in the wilderness.

Clausewitz regarded war as "politics carried on by other means". I would prefer to see it as economics, rather than politics, "carried on by other means". Its fuel is the military-industrial complex (and in this respect it is notable that the global armaments industry has not suffered from the recession that has so deeply affected virtually every other sector of production). Let me correct myself: it is a military-industrial-academic complex, because many people in the universities are seduced by the opportunity to give it an intellectual justification. They are the retailers of fear and anguish.

So was civil defence reborn. Its first act was to suck up money in copious quantities. The links between civil defence and civil protection vary from one country to another, but, however they are configured, they are always joined at the hip by the question of funding. Their interconnection brings me to another of my pet interests: the relationship between centrism and devolution.

Civil defence is necessarily based on the nation state. If time and space permitted, I would launch a diatribe about that and the question of national identity (let me declare my interest: I am a federalist and anti-nationalist). Rather than being the natural state of human beings, nations are a relatively recent construct that in less than half a millennium has contrived a temporary solution to the questions of identity and citizenship. But the defence of the realm requires a national approach, because in most countries that is where in the hierarchy the armed forces, intelligence services and command structures are located.

In contrast, wherever it is, civil protection needs local input. Failure to organise locally, failure to support local solutions to local problems, and failure to take local interests into account will result in the failure of civil protection. Evidently, it needs to be harmonised at successively higher levels of government, or otherwise there will not be enough interoperability. And civil protection forces are moving ever further around the world's chess-board of disaster responses. In this respect one of the recent trends has been to fuse international with domestic disaster response in the interests of greater efficiency (but it needs a radical overhaul of attitudes and training).

I have been a regional government employee in two countries and have observed the local response to threats, risks and hazards as it occurs and in a variety of settings. I am convinced that it flourishes the most when it is given autonomy (but perhaps also guidance and support). Herein lies the dilemma for most national governments. Devolving power is a vote-getter, but after it has been devolved, governments tend to regret their actions and want it back. This is especially true if the intermediate and local levels of public administration turn out to be pugnaciously independent.

If civil protection is very poorly developed in a given place, once disaster strikes it will be swept aside as aid, assistance and command lines are imported into the area. Once these are withdrawn, as if they were the Roman legions marching back to defend the centre of a collapsing empire, then the local response is doomed to be the victim of its own ineffectiveness.

Local (and indeed regional and national) administrators vary in their attitudes to disaster reduction and response. This field suffers considerably from the "no votes in sewage" syndrome. In other words, come what may, it has a negative profile. Even the concepts of more safety and security don't seem to be sufficiently positive to enthuse politicians in search of re-election (or not unless there has very recently been a bad disaster in their precincts). Moreover, politicians can avail themselves of the Great Gamble: that disaster will not strike during their next term of office. As a result of the public's lack of understanding of probabilities and the need to prepare for the worse in "times of peace", they usually get away with it. If a disaster does occur, many of them are adept at blaming the failure to prepare on someone else.

Few nations can aspire to the levels of rigour and honesty that prevail in Sweden. Having discovered, amid great national scandal, that it did not have the capacity to manage the Swedish aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, it set up a national agency for civil protection. Due to lack of experience with this form of organisation, it did not work well. The Swedes learnt fast—very fast indeed—and within months had it reorganised and functioning well at all levels from Stockholm to the provincial towns. No doubt Swedes who read this will, through familiarity with defects to the system, pick holes in my description, but compared to other countries I can assure them that they are making a counsel of perfection. And the science and art of civil protection are both highly imprecise.

Now there are countries, like France, where the administrative traditions are highly centralised and are likely to remain so. They will have to find their own solutions to the problem of local autonomy in the face of disasters. Let me remind them that the opposite of such autonomy is, if I may borrow a bastard term, assistentialism. By ironic reference to existentialism, this is dependence on imported assistance. Once the source of that help dries up, nothing is left but a dependence on something that is not there. It tends to kill local initiative.

To watch other countries deal with the problem of managing disasters and associated risks is to chart the progress of a constant, often very dynamic, tension between centrism and devolution. The latter solves problems, but it does so by engendering the fear that things will get out of hand.

A subsidiary issue connected with this tension between centrism and devolution is that of the dual roles of imported and indigenous knowledge. Throughout this discussion, I use the term 'imported' to mean "brought into the area in question", but not necessarily across an international border. Imported technologies, know-how and procedures are often vilified for their effect in depleting local autonomy and making local communities dependent on extraneous ways of doing things that, perhaps, they don't fully understand. This is often very true, most sadly, but it would be wrong to glorify all indigenous knowledge, some of which is positively toxic. For example, after the 1964 Great Alaskan Earthquake it was reported that Inuit fishermen had a tradition which informed them that tsunamis are composed of two waves. Many were drowned by the third wave, which was the largest in the 1964 sequence. But now back to the primary distinction.

Theoretically, both civil defence and civil protection are potential hand-maidens of revolution, or at least of insurrection. In fact, in the politically polarised times of the Cold War, with all their associated fears and suspicions, in places, civil protection was actively prevented from developing, in case it led to a coup d'êtat. This, of course, was when civil protection was seen as a sub-military parallel to the armed forces.

Although few generals, majors and colonels will admit it, military commanders often feel out of their depth when dealing with disasters. Such events are a shadowy, ambiguous form of enemy and many of the tactics used to deal with unruly citizens can only be practised on the very people the armed forces are seeking to protect. Hence the gradual 'civilianisation' of civil defence and its transition into civil protection. When the leaders of the latter are no longer military men but are trained women, we will have arrived. Many women have shown extraordinary aptitude as disaster managers, although it is not yet clear whether this is because they are naturally superior at the job to men or merely because to make progress they are forced to compete in a male-dominated world. I suspect the former.

So the tension of opposites between civil defence and civil protection is likely to continue. Civil protection does not do some of the things that civil defence does, notably forensic analysis, surveillance and intelligence gathering. But civil defence tends to be inept at managing natural disasters on the local level. The military-industrial academic complex would have us believe that the threats from extreme natural events are relatively stable, while those from terrorism and unrest are growing dynamically. In reality it could be the other way around, especially given the potential effects of climate change. True, the momentous adaptations that a dynamic climate will require of human populations will probably foment unrest, but is the solution civil defence, or is it greater equity in the distribution of resources? And greater emphasis on the stewardship of the resources we have?

One issue that arises out of all of this is welfare. Strictly conceived, this is the provision of assistance necessary for adequately decent living conditions to people who cannot provide such a thing for themselves. Unfortunately, welfare has tended to mutate into largesse, and this often has a political motivation behind it. The effect of this has been to cheapen the concept and render it both unworkable and unacceptable to society. Yet welfare will always be needed, unless one subscribes to such a Darwinian view that one believes that social misfits and losers in the great lottery of life should be callously abandoned to their fate.

Hence, welfare needs constantly to be redefined and reinvented. It should go hand in hand with the sort of empowerment (big governance rather than big government) that enables some people to avoid it. And we need to avoid attitudes to welfare that resemble those of the Victorian moralists: properly conceived, it is neither a social disease nor an intolerable burden on society.

Although it is not a tension of opposites, resilience and sustainability need to be considered together. The one is the other. Hence, the sustainability of disaster risk reduction is the sustainability of lifestyles and livelihoods, and of the Earth's carrying capacity. No technofix can ensure that, so the problem is social and cultural, even emotional, as much as it is one of applying more and more technology.

We have moved away from the idea of the New Baroque Era and the tension of opposites. There are many of these and I encourage those who have patiently followed this discussion to seek and identify them. Is resilience the opposite of vulnerability, and is the change in emphasis a useful switch from a negative to a more positive view of disaster? Can we better solve the problem by adopting a "can-do" approach, or must we first develop a better understanding of the sum total of human suffering and misery.

To end these talks, I pose the question, what comes after resilience? Like everyone else I don't know, and I have no crystal ball that reveals the future to me. Like all committed scientists and citizens, I have tried to follow the trends, and reflect on where they are taking us. So I leave you with a possible clue: perhaps the tension is between fragility and hardening. And I leave you to work out what that might mean for disaster risk reduction. Thank you for your attention.

Resilience Against Earthquakes: Some Practical Suggestions for Planners and Managers

Figure 1. An explanatory classification of vulnerability to hazards and disasters. Source: MOVE Project, www.move-fp7.eu.

Figure 2. Characteristic pattern of damage in a multiple-storey condominium building affected by the L'Aquila, central Italy earthquake of 6 April 2009.

Abstract. Resilience against earthquakes is a broad concept that requires a multi-disciplinary response. This paper offers a working definition of resilience and associated concepts, including vulnerability to earthquakes, coping, capacity and redundancy. It concludes that resilience must be set in motion and maintained by a collective effort that involves all stakeholders and people who are at risk in areas of high seismicity. Resilience is one of the fundamental components of disaster risk reduction (DRR), an overall strategy for adapting to and mitigating the impact of extreme events on people and society. The paper offers a modest contribution to the creation of a methodology for resilience against earthquakes. This includes ten suggestions for action, as follows. (1) Tell people what to do in an earthquake. Research is needed on the best forms of self protective behaviour during seismic emergencies. This needs one to understand the characteristic forms of building failure and how they affect building occupants. It also requires knowledge of how people react to earthquakes and what opportunities there are for self-protective behaviour. (2) Develop urban search and rescue capacity on site. This need not be expensive or particularly challenging. It requires stockpiling of basic rescue equipment at strategic points in urban areas and training programmes for local residents. (3) Reduce non-structural as well as structural hazards. A significant proportion of earthquake injuries arises from damage to the non-structural elements of the built environment. Anchoring and securing these, and designing them to resist earthquake displacement, can save lives and reduce the incidence of serious injuries. (4) Plan flexibly. Emergency planning should be a process and not an end. It must be adapted continually to changes in knowledge of hazards and in society and its vulnerability. (5) Create networks. These can improve the exchange of knowledge, information and training. Networks are needed at all scales, from the local to the international, and from professionals to local residents threatened by earthquakes. (6) Encourage governance. This requires involvement of many different kinds of stakeholder in the processes of earthquake disaster risk reduction. (7) Make good practice proliferate and adapt it to local circumstances. (8) Ensure that programmes of DRR are sustainable in the long term. In order to work they must have a constant revenue stream and also the full support of beneficiaries. (9) Before the next major seismic event occurs create a strategy for recovering from it. Consider how the recovery will be planned and guided, and what needs will be generated by the event. (10) Create a culture of resilience against earthquakes, in which the problem is widely understood and taken seriously by people who are at risk or are in positions of authority. This also involves sharing knowledge about earthquakes and sharing the risk to society.

Key words: Earthquakes, Resilience, Disasters, Injury prevention, Damage reduction.

Introduction: On the Definition of Terms

The term resilience, or resiliency, had its origins in developments about a century ago in the field of mechanics and materials testing (Hoffman 1948). A resilient material has enough rigidity to resist an applied force and also sufficient flexibility to absorb part of the stress. The concept was taken up in the 1960s by ecologists (Holling 1973) and later by psychologists (Rutter 1987). In the 2000s it began to be widely applied to the field of disaster risk reduction (DRR). By analogy with mechanics, a resilient society is one that is simultaneously able to resist the impact of disasters (i.e. avoid a certain amount of harm and damage) and absorb it by adapting to the hazard (Berkes 2007).

Resilience in DRR interacts with the concepts of coping, capacity and capability (Billing and Madengruber 2006). A society that is resilient to hazards has developed its ability to cope with them. This involves both direct prior preparedness and setting aside resources against future losses (i.e. capacity). Formally, the latter can be achieved by insurance (the maintenance of a pool of money to reimburse people who suffer loss) and by creating redundancy, the provision of duplicate resources, services and procedures (Carroll 2004). As redundancy is expensive, and because it can tie up resources that are seldom used, it is not usually one of the favoured options, but when a major event takes place it can become a very precious safeguard.

The sum of resilience, coping and capacity is the inverse of vulnerability (Birkmann 2006). In the present context, this refers to the propensity of human socio-economic systems to suffer harm as a result of major hazards. Vulnerability is the dominant component of risk and both are difficult to measure because they are innate phenomena. Like friction, vulnerability is only mobilised when a hazard strikes. By the time it is recognised and can be investigated it has already become impact, its post hoc form. In disaster research there is a developing consensus that the protection of lives and livelihoods (i.e. gainful employment) is the key to reducing vulnerability and increasing resilience (Cannon 2006). It has also become apparent that vulnerability is composed of many factors, as summarised in Figure 1. The components interact and influence each other.

The 'What?' and 'How?' of Resilience

The axiom that "resilience is needed against earthquakes" requires qualification in order to ensure that it does not lead to an indiscriminate approach. Priorities need to be established so that resources are not wasted. In general terms, these should be to reduce loss of life, care for the injured, limit damage and provide conditions for rapid and effective recovery, including the timely provision of shelter to people who have lost their homes. Given the propensity of earthquakes to cause mass fatalities (Spence 2007), the largest emphasis should be given to effective (including cost-effective) measures to reduce loss of life. In this context, resilience must be created and maintained by collective effort. All members of society are stakeholders and all should be involved in the process of making conditions safer. This requires mechanisms of consultation and social inclusion, which thus contribute to the process of governance, government by active consensus (Qian 2010).

As building collapse is widely known to be the principal cause of death and injury in earthquakes, it follows logically that one of the greatest strategic priorities should be to make buildings less susceptible to catastrophic damage by enforcing good building codes, retrofitting pre-code buildings and banning unsafe development (Xie 2007). Note, however, that non-structural damage within and around buildings is an important secondary source of injury (Petal 2004).

Specialised search and rescue are likely to be in short supply during a major seismic event. However, little is known about the impact of this on rates of survival in collapsed buildings, except that it is potentially high (De Bruycker et al. 1983). Moreover, little is known about the impact of immediate response by untrained, unequipped people, who are often the only ones on site when rescue is needed. Evidence from the Mexico City earthquake of 1985 suggests that amateur rescue in collapsed buildings can be highly dangerous (Durkin 1989), unless it is complemented by training and the provision of safety equipment.

Resilience means a safe environment, but if it cannot be achieved in any reasonable future time period, people should at least be encouraged to learn self-protective modes of behaviour.

A Strategy to Encourage Self-Protective Behaviour in Earthquakes

If buildings cannot be made safe enough to withstand earthquakes, can occupant behaviour be modified in such a way as to minimise the risks of being crushed or entrapped when a disaster occurs? Unfortunately, despite decades of research on the epidemiology of earthquakes, there is still a lack of knowledge of types of injury in relation to patterns of building collapse and occupant behaviour, and thus of risk factors in particular situations (e.g. Sami et al. 2009). Nevertheless, it would be useful to develop a methodology that will form the basis of a strategy to react better to earthquakes when they occur.

The first step is to know the level of seismic risk and what it is capable of doing. This involves predicting magnitudes, recurrence intervals, maximum accelerations of the ground and other variables that influence the performance of buildings and structures. It also involves developing an understanding of the seismic performance of typical buildings in the local area. In many architectural environments this may be relatively easy to achieve at a basic level. For instance, the L'Aquila earthquake of 6 April 2009 in central Italy led to characteristic patterns of damage to vernacular housing that involved only two main types of building: one in stone masonry and one in reinforced concrete (Alexander 2011). An example of how lack of stiffness in a frame structure leads to a concentration on mid-floor damage is given in Figure 2.

The second step is to create scenarios of impact and damage and relate them to patterns of human activity and occupancy of buildings and built environments that are at risk from seismic events. There are essentially five levels of risk to people, in relation to seismic damage levels.

1. Damage level: [1] minimum damage to walls, fitments and furniture.

Personal risk level: prudent behaviour will minimise risks.

2. Damage level: [2] significant damage to structures, cladding and fitments.

Personal risk level: significant risk of injury but not of death.

3. Damage level: [3] general damage and collapse of architectural elements.

Personal risk level: significant risk of injury but relatively low risk of death.

4. Damage level: [4] serious damage or partial collapse of building.

Personal risk level: strong risk of injury and significant risk of death.

5. Damage level: [5] collapse of more than 50% of the structure.

Personal risk level: limited and mainly unpredictable probability of survival.

Whereas little can be done to save people caught in the total collapse of a structure, the previous four levels involve degrees of criticality in which behaviour will influence the probability of being injured (levels 1-4) or killed (levels 3-4).

The procedure for enhancing self-protected behaviour is thus as follows. First ascertain the characteristic patterns of seismic damage and transform them into simple models that are applicable to significant proportions of buildings in a given urban area. This will help explain how people are put at risk. It is helpful if such buildings can be mapped for emergency planning purposes so as to show where the greatest vulnerabilities lie. It is also useful if the level of vulnerability to damage can be ascertained for each building by structural engineers. This is seismic microzonation.

Secondly, survival strategies need to be worked out. These should be communicated to residents and building users, who should be encouraged to plan for an emergency situation. The survival strategy could consist of the following parts.

1. Identify the safest part of the house with regard to the following risks: fall of tiles or collapse of the entire roof
- instability of the façade and cornice
- potential collapse of the stairs during egress
- detachment of beams and risk that they will batter down the building
- use of heterogeneous materials giving rise to a complex seismic response.

2. Avoid risky behaviour.

3. Create an exit strategy:
- identify a safe place to reach near to the house
- identify the most dangerous parts of the house and how to avoid them

4. Create a mutual support network of friends, relatives and neighbours.

5. Collect and store useful equipment:
- train family members and test the reaction plan.

For example, in many cases façades that are badly anchored to the structure of the building can collapse, or at least elements of them can detach during the shaking and fall into the street. At the same time, stairways are often the least stable part of the building, especially if they are inadequately suspended from floors and load-bearing members. They may collapse during the tremors. Hence it may be highly inappropriate to rush out into the street until the hazards of doing so have been properly assessed (Lomnitz 1970).

Ideally, a programme of resilience against earthquakes should accumulate information and expertise about possible damage and potential reactions of people caught in major seismic events. There is also some scope for pre-emptive planning of search and rescue, especially if it is known where, characteristically, people are most likely to be trapped when a certain kind of building collapses (Olson and Olson 1987).

Ten Suggestions for Increasing Resilience to Earthquakes

The previous section offered a rather limited strategy for improving survival rates in earthquakes. This should be part of a much broader initiative to save lives, reduce damage and injuries and increase society's resilience in the face of the seismic threat. There follow ten suggestions about how to achieve this.

(1) Tell people what to do during an earthquake. As noted in the previous section, the biggest risk tends to be when people are at home in vulnerable vernacular housing, especially at night when they are sleeping. There is a need for authoritative knowledge on the best self-protective behaviour, and for a methodology to assess risk in vernacular housing and other kinds of accommodation.

(2) Develop urban search and rescue (USAR) capabilities on site. One of the great tragedies of major earthquakes is that USAR capacity often comes from thousands of kilometres away and does not arrive until 36-72 hours after the earthquake. Typically, between 1,200 and 2,300 rescuers from up to 50 different countries may converge on the disaster area in this way (El-Tawil and Aguirre 2010). Instead, USAR capacity is needed immediately, and in all cases before 12 hours have elapsed. Hence, stockpiling of simple equipment (ladders, ropes, flashlights, loud-hailers, reflective garments, hard hats, first-aid medical supplies, etc.) in local neighbourhoods and training local people to constitute their own rescue groups can achieve much. However, people must be trained to avoid the risks associated with urban heavy rescue and to understand the nature of earthquake injuries and how they should be treated by basic life support (first-aid) procedures.

(3) Reduce non-structural as well as structural risks. Many of these are internal to buildings, although some, like collapse of signage, are external. Many non-structural risks can easily be assessed and remedied, often by a small amount of work securing items to structural members with screws, bands and other anchors.

(4) Plan flexibly. Planning should be a process not an end in itself: in fact, the planning process is often more useful than the product (the emergency plan), as it tends to identify and highlight problems that need to be solved. Plans should cover all risks and should allow for multiple and secondary hazards. They should use scenarios of impact, response and recovery, as this is the best way of investigating what is likely to occur in a major emergency. Scenarios are flexible investigations of possible alternative futures: rather than being a predictive device, the scenario is a means of understanding cause and effect relationships, and of ascertaining future needs.

(5) Create networks. These need to be built at all scales, from international collaborations of experts to local and area networks of responders and residents. The presence of support networks helps keep the issue of seismic safety current and ensures that people do not feel alone. It helps disseminate information and promote learning and information sharing (Brower et al. 2009). Networks may be efficient means of diffusing innovation to people who can benefit from it. They create a benign form of disaster subculture, which contributes to social solidarity.

(6) Encourage governance. This can include promoting stakeholder involvement and personal disaster planning. Few people have their own disaster plans, or any idea as to what they and their families would need to do in a disaster situation. Yet it need not be so. Governance for seismic risk reduction is both an national and a local matter, but as the local area is always the theatre of disaster impact and response, it is the main foundation of all governance devoted to resolving this issue. Moreover, one needs to understand and work with local culture, as this will facilitate the acceptance of new ideas and strategies.

(7) Make good practice proliferate. The networks can be used to ensure that this happens. Although there is really no such thing as best practice, as circumstances differ from one place to another, good examples can be adapted to new areas, and research results need to be utilised.

(8) Ensure programmes are sustainable. For this to happen, the programmes need to have full support from stakeholders in all branches of civil society. One recurrent problem is that while it is relatively easy to induce public administrators to authorise one-off payments (i.e. capital expenditure), they are less happy with recurrent spending (i.e. revenue expenditure). Nevertheless, this is necessary, as salaries have to be paid and programmes need to benefit from continuity of funding. Hence, disaster risk reduction needs to be considered as a fundamental everyday service, as essential as waste treatment and electricity supply, and as well funded.

(9) Create a post-earthquake policy and strategy before the next major seismic event. Few public administrations have been innovative enough to plan for recovery before disaster, although the disaster researcher Harold Foster described some such examples of that as long ago as the 1970s (Foster 1980). Nevertheless, although the full details of what will be needed cannot be known before the event, the basic lineaments of recovery are likely to be clear in advance. There should thus be a plan for the provision of shelter, and a strategy for safeguarding livelihoods and thus promoting economic recovery.

(10) Create a culture of resilience against earthquakes. This involves a social programme of information and discussion that brings resilience into the mainstream of daily life. People need to be induced to believe that although natural hazards do not strike every day, they are a constant threat to lives and livelihoods and there is a common responsibility to face up to that threat. It helps to be able to answer the question "what is welfare?" (Forrest 1973). The answer should probably be that it is the safeguarding of people who, through poverty, age or disability, are unable to look after themselves in some way. Welfare also means the ethical distribution of resources and the maintenance of minimum standards of living. The concept, and its morality and ethics, should not be distorted by disaster. Hence, it needs to be examined--fairly, critically and explicitly--before disaster strikes.

Conclusion: Beyond Resilience

The discussion presented above suggests that there is much that can be done to reduce the risks of casualties and socio-economic effects of earthquakes, even if damage cannot substantially be abated. Society needs to be hardened, so that it resists the impact of disaster by devoting resources and organisation to that process. This is sometimes termed social capital building (Murphy 2007). Thus, expertise, experience, know-how and resourcefulness need to be concentrated in the community and conserved and developed over time so that they can be handed on from one generation to the next. Programmes need to be sustainable in their own right and also need to interface with the more general problem of the sustainability of life. In fact, perhaps the biggest challenge of the future will be, not merely to make society resilient to disasters such as earthquakes, but also to make it resilient to less cataclysmic changes (in sea level, global climate, resource availability, and so on) that are none the less fundamental.

References

Alexander, D.E. 2011. Mortality and morbidity risk in the L'Aquila, Italy, earthquake of 6 April 2009 and lessons to be learned. In R.S. Spence and E. Ho (eds) Human Casualties in Earthquakes. Advances in Natural and Technological Hazards Research no. 29, Springer, Berlin, Ch. 13.

Berkes, F. 2007. Understanding uncertainty and reducing vulnerability: lessons from resilience thinking. Natural Hazards 41(2): 283-295.

Billing, P. and U. Madengruber 2006. Overcoming the black hole: outline for a quantitative model to compare coping capacities across countries. In J. Birkmann (ed.) Measuring Vulnerability to Natural Hazards: Towards Disaster Resilient Societies. United Nations University Press, Tokyo: 403-414.

Birkmann, J. 2006. Indicators and criteria for measuring vulnerability: theoretical bases and requirements. In J. Birkmann (ed.) Measuring Vulnerability to Natural Hazards: Towards Disaster Resilient Societies. United Nations University Press, Tokyo: 55-77.

Brower, R.S., S.O. Choi, H-S. Jeong and J. Dilling 2009. Forms of inter-organizational learning in emergency management networks. Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management 6: Article 66.

Cannon, T. 2006. Vulnerability analysis, livelihoods and disasters. In W.J. Ammann, S. Dannenmann and L. Vulliet (eds) Risk 21: Coping with Risks Due to Natural Hazards in the 21st Century. A.A. Balkema, Taylor and Francis, London: 41-49.

Carroll, J.S. 2004. Redundancy as a design principle and an operating principle. Risk Analysis 24(4): 955-957.

De Bruycker, M., D. Greco, I. Annino, M.A. Stazi, N. De Ruggiero, M. Triassi, Y.P. De Kettenis and M.F. Lechat 1983. The 1980 earthquake in southern Italy: rescue of trapped victims and mortality. Bulletin of the World Health Organization 61(6): 1021-1025.

Durkin, M.E. 1989. The role of the physical setting in earthquake injuries: the Mexico experience. In Lessons Learned from the 1985 Mexico Earthquake. Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, El Cerrito, Calif.: 205-208.

El-Tawil, S. and B. Aguirre 2010. Search and rescue in collapsed structures: engineering and social science aspects. Disasters 34(4): 1084-1101.

Forrest, T.R. 1973. Needs and group emergence: developing a welfare response. American Behavioral Scientist 16: 413-425.

Foster, H.D. 1980. Disaster Planning: The Preservation of Life and Property. Springer-Verlag, New York, 275 pp.

Hoffman, R.M. 1948. A generalised concept of resilience. Textile Research Journal 18(3): 141-148.

Holling, C.S. 1973. Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Reviews of Ecological Systems 4:1-23.

Lomnitz, C. 1970. Casualties and behaviour of populations during earthquakes. Bulletin of Seismological Society of America 60: 1309-1313.

Murphy, B.L. 2007. Locating social capital in resilient community-level emergency management. Natural Hazards 41(2): 297-315.

Olson, R.S. and R.A. Olson 1987. Urban heavy rescue. Earthquake Spectra 3(4): 645-658.

Petal, M.A. 2004. Urban Disaster Mitigation and Preparedness: The 1999 Kocaeli Earthquake. PhD Thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.

Qian Ye 2010. Integrated risk governance project: towards better governance of very large-scale risks in the world. International Journal of Disaster Risk Science 1(1): 44-45.

Rutter, M. 1987. Psychosocial resilience and protective mechanisms. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 57(3): 316-331.

Sami, F., F. Ali, S.H.H. Zaidi, H. Rehman, T. Ahmad and M.I. Siddiqui 2009. The October 2005 earthquake in northern Pakistan: patterns of injuries in victims brought to the emergency relief hospital, Doraha, Mansehra. Prehospital and Disaster Medicine 24(6): 535-539.

Spence, R. 2007. Saving lives in earthquakes: successes and failures in seismic protection since 1960. Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering 5: 139-251.

Xie, L-L., Y-H. Ma and J-J. Hu 2007. A conception of casualty control based seismic design for buildings. Natural Hazards 40(2): 279-287.