Resilience is an illusion. In saying that I mean no disrespect to resilience officers, whose work is honourable, vital and necessary. However, whether resilience has as its goal to 'bounce back' or to 'bounce forward', it represents a tendency to seek homeostasis, in other words a quest for an eventual stable equilibrium. But in the disasters field we have no equilibrium. You may think of this as akin to a game of football in which the goalposts are now moving faster than the players can run. The goal is ever receding.
We have four grand challenges in disaster risk reduction:-
- to adapt constantly to far-reaching and abrupt changes in a volatile world
- to disseminate the concepts of safety and security
- to create and use foresight (as scientifically as possible)
- to develop a rigorous methodology for emergency planning and management
I must qualify that list by adding that we need:-
- to adapt constantly to changes in a volatile world in which the leaders do not particularly want to adapt
- to disseminate the concepts of safety and security in an environment that is distracted by other things, disbelieves the need and is hostile to the concept
- to create and use foresight when most people would rather do without it
- to develop a rigorous methodology for emergency planning and management when few believe it is necessary.
To understand the magnitude of the task let me briefly describe an example, that of Covid-19 in one country. It is by no means an isolated illustration. On 12th October 2008 I attended a conference at which an epidemiologist stood up and said "My job is to tell you something you don't want to know, and ask you to spend money you haven't got on something you don't think is going to happen." He then outlined in perfect detail exactly what would happen during a viral pandemic, including the medical, economic, social, behavioural and psychological consequences. I taught pandemic preparedness on the basis of his example for the next 12 years. Then it came to pass.
Since 2005 when the World Health Organisation started to advocate serious viral disease planning the United Kingdom ran or participated in nine major simulation exercises on pandemics, some of them pan-European initiatives. By 2020 it had forgotten or ignored most of the lessons, sold off or destroyed the equipment and drugs, and turned its attention firmly to lesser contingencies, despite the fact that pandemics consistently topped the list in the national risk register. In 2020 it failed to remedy these deficiencies and also failed adequately to take on board the lessons of what other countries were experiencing and doing. Shortages of personnel and equipment abounded, a heavily over-centralised strategy led to chaos, corruption and massive waste. Emergency planning excluded emergency planners and was put in the hands of a consortium of medical doctors and politicians, yet half the battle in a pandemic is to manage the logistical, social and economic consequences. The role of the emergency planner and manager in the UK had been declining for about 15 years and it involved no defined career structure or incentives to professionalise.
The net result was the loss of 50,000 savable lives and the complete waste of £50 billion. Note, first, that in a disaster a government cannot help but spend money on it, and copiously; secondly that good planning and wise investments can avoid enormous losses and casualties; thirdly, that what I have just recounted is true for most other kinds of major disaster; and fourthly that we face bigger, more spectacular events in the future. As I stated in the witness box of the UK National Covid Inquiry, my answer to the question, "Does the government, within the limits of what a government can and should do, keep the citizen safe? is a resounding “no”. My UK example, by the way, is not heresay. It is fully documented in many reliable publications.
In Europe we have lived since February 2022 on a knife edge concerning the risk that the continent be overwhelmed by lethal toxicity.* In this increasingly bellicose world, that continues to be the case. The flood disaster at Valencia in October 2024 reminded me that I had personally seen the same thing at nearby Puerto Lumbrebras in December 1972. What price progress in 52 years? The Valencia disaster was very similar to the wildfires at Los Angeles in the sense that it took environmental mismanagement to make it so large. These root causes are also well documented.
There have recently been some natural hazard events of extraordinary size and power, but they are no more than curtain raisers. Natural hazard impacts are becoming fiercer, more extensive and more frequent. For example, major wildfires in central California occurred once every 70 years before human habitation and take place once every two years now. We must also grapple with complexity and intersection with other forms of threat and hazard.
There are 16 vital earth systems that risk collapse as, inexorably, the mean global temperature rises. Current leadership by the United States tends to favour collapse rather than protection. Unfortunately, if it occurs, the whole world will suffer, not just the USA. Truly we are in uncharted waters, uncharted because of the lack of foresight and preparedness, coupled, of course, with the pursuance of policies that damage the world's environment in the name of private profit.
Progress in providing safety against disasters has stalled and shows signs of sliding backwards. Large amounts of research on the topic have produced gains that are at best extremely modest and in many cases negligible. There is still a pervasive and naïve view that all we need to do is provide knowledge and it will be received with open arms by decision makers who will use it to the benefit of humanity. There is abundant evidence that this is not so. Much of the research that needs to be done has no chance of being sponsored and funded.
We are approaching the end of the Second Age of Enlightenment. Paradoxically, machine learning is not going to make up for the loss of illumination. Rather than being blinded by the glitz of artificial [un]intelligence, we should remember that AI is not a substitute for thinking, and above all offers no alternative to clear thinking. It is also unrealistic to imagine that emerging technology in any of its forms will save us from disaster. Remember the words of Professor Henry Quarantelli in 1997: "Technology leads a double life,” he wrote, “that which its makers intended and that which they did not intend." Nowhere is this more true than in the gradual conversion of social media from a source of community cohesion and a means of informing oneself to a purveyor of "alternative facts" and unscientific fantasy, a "manufactured reality" that people nevertheless believe. Therein lies a huge challenge for all of us.
Obviously the world needs to fight for sustainability, good stewardship of resources, equity, fairness and peaceful cooperation. On the response front, civil protection everywhere needs to be an order of magnitude bigger and more potent than it is now. Its tasks will be life-saving response, damage limitation, public safety and launching recovery. The penalty for not investing massively in it will be vast and disproportionate increases in losses.
Despite the obvious need for mitigation, emergency response capability cannot be neglected. It must be:-
- a locally-based, regionally coordinated, national system
- governed by common standards, especially for emergency planning and management
- adaptable to emerging hazards and threats
- an order of magnitude larger than it is now (and properly funded)
- modern and based on communication and coordination
- something that embraces the voluntary sector and the public as protagonists.
To change culture usually requires much time and huge resources to achieve, but it is possible, and in this case it is imperative.
Once we had broad consensuses that authoritarianism is a bad thing and truth is to be respected. Not any more in this 'post-truth' epoch. In the world after 1945 we had mechanisms for settling disputes. They were never perfect, but they have recently suffered severe erosion. Is the ineffectiveness of the United Nations (and its disunity) the fault of the organisation or its members? I suggest the latter.
The end of the Second Age of Enlightenment can be detected in the following changes:-
- 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
- the "post-truth" world:
- the spread of lies, "alternative facts", unverifiable theories, etc.
- disrespect for objectivity
- anti-intellectualism
- the coarsening of debate
- 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.
In the light of this, our 'operating environment' as advocates of disaster risk reduction has changed drastically. It now needs a radical rethink to examine how, in such a sceptical, difficult milieu, we can present rational, constructive ideas when they are countermanded by demagoguery and very blatant forms of ignorance. This is now our challenge. We have hardly begun to tackle it, yet it remains an absolute imperative.
*I refer mainly to damage and mismanagement at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Europe's largest, but also to attacks on the Chornobyl sarcophagus. Obviously limited or outright nuclear war is also a looming threat.
