by Charlie Edwards | Feb 3, 2008 | Conflict and security
The excellent FT Magazine has a review by Michael Skapinker of recent books on disaster and resilience. I don’t agree with the selection of books on offer (I think Lee Clarke, for instance, provides a much better analysis of worst case scenarios and their impact on humans), but Skapinker’s article makes for interesting reading all the same.
Aside from the now familiar explanation of black swans, our inability to anticipate them and our frequent failure to ‘connect the dots’ (as with the FBI officer in Minneapolis who told an uninterested headquarters that he was ‘trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center’), the most interesting part of this review is about the difficulties that governments and the private sector have in evaluating risks and – based on their analysis – doing something about it.
According to Skapinker tragedy and disaster excites us:
Years after the immense San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which left 3,000 dead and half the city’s population destitute, Kathleen Norris, one of the survivors, said: “How I wish that to every life there might come, if only once, such days of change and freedom … Everyone talking together, dishevelled, excited, running to see what was happening elsewhere, running back, endlessly diverted, satiated for once with excitement.”
Our relationship with disaster is complex.
Our imaginations are drawn to calamity, as the entertainment industry knows: consider disaster movies such as The Towering Inferno or Titanic, or the popularity of fairground attractions such as the “ride of death”. When real disaster happens, we cannot help feeling something of the same thrill – provided we are not among the injured or bereaved. From the survivors and the families, as well as from the media, comes the demand to find out who knew what and when, who could have prevented the tragedy, and how the government plans to ensure it never happens again. The call for revenge is strong: 9/11 resulted in two wars that are still unwon.
The bad news is that we remain both unable to forecast calamity, and reluctant to pay the price of prevention.
Consider climate change: the overwhelming consensus of scientific opinion is that it is man-made, yet how many of us are prepared to give up our cars or holiday flights to mitigate its effects? The good news however is that we are becoming increasingly more resilient to shocks.
As Skapinker says much of the official response to 9/11 for example resulted in improvements for the future – the replacement buildings on Ground Zero will be sturdier and safer than the Twin Towers, for example. And it has always been the case that disasters create the spur for better infrastructure: fires and floods in the earliest days of American settlement led to the creation of insurance, fire brigades and safety regulations.
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Feb 1, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
John Robb’s thinking about resilient communities over at Global Guerrillas:
It should be clear, as we watch the gyrations and excesses of global markets, that no organization/state/group has any meaningful control over its direction. The same is true for almost every other aspect of globalization, from the environment to transnational crime to energy flows. In short, we’ve lost control and our collective future is in the hands of a morally neutral system that is operating in ways that we don’t fully understand (nor will we).
The best defense against this emerging situation is not to call for new Manhattan projects or global treaties or Marshall plans, which won’t work since we can neither marshal the resources necessary nor collectively agree on anything other than the most basic rules of connectivity, it is to slowly introduce organic stability into out global system. The concept I’ve latched onto as a solution is what I call the resilient community.
This conceptual model creates a set of new services that allow the smallest viable subset of social systems, the community (however you define it), to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being completely vulnerable to its excesses. These services are configured to provide the ability to survive an extended disconnection from the global grid in the following areas (an incomplete list): energy, food, security (both active and passive), communications and transportation.
C.f. my recent post here on top-down versus bottom-up resilience.
by Charlie Edwards | Jan 29, 2008 | Global system
The morning sessions were quite good, but the problem the old school (sitting behind and to the left of me) had was that most of the presentations were just scene setters. Paul Cornish, on the other hand, said they were more like undergraduate lectures on international security.
We aren’t able, it seems, to move beyond talking about the big trends, poles of power and the possible or probable impacts of global risks on societies (now or in the future). Instead, we get stuck discussing how difficult it is to reform the institutions that make up the international architecture – while revelling in conversations about food security and resource scarcity because they’re relatively new and fashionable issues and there is no baggage (or at least not quite so much baggage) attached to them.
Next month I’m talking at a Chatham House conference on security and defence futures. I’m meant to be critiquing the British government’s new national security strategy – but given that it apparently won’t be published for another few weeks, I’m going to opt for setting out some potential routes forward instead.
Back to the Hague and the afternoon sessions were ok. I chose the workshop on risk management processes and made three mediocre points:
– We can be more imaginative in the risk management process
– We need to pay more attention to the possible risks rather than focusing solely on the probable ones
– We should build and develop more comprehensive scenarios as part of the risk management process. At the moment, the majority focus on specific events or issues.
Final thoughts:
– Black swan event: Being offered milk at lunch
– Conference fact: The Dutch have one word for safety and security: Veiligheid (neat)
– Realpolitik: I learnt that the European Commission created a Critical Infrastructure Warning Information Network (CIWIN) in 2003 to facilitate exchange of information on shared threats and vulnerabilities and appropriate counter-measures and strategies. Not only did it get a poor reception from member states, but some even refuse to use it. The Commission also wants more information on ‘near misses’ which can inform their work and share them with member states. Get this: Officially the Commission can’t ask a member state for that information (they have to go through various back doors). Mad, isn’t it? No incentive to share information means that member states don’t: what’s in it for them?
Back to Blighty…
by Charlie Edwards | Jan 29, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
I’m not allowed to blog about the session I am currently in for reasons of commercial confidentiality (which raises a point about how we share information on risks on a practical day-to-day basis – which is what the presentation is about).
However – we had an awesome discussion in the break. According to people present we need to be aware of two things in the near and medium term (Alex has blogged on some of this before).
1) We face a food shock like that of the energy shock in the 1970s
2) The bio-fuels market is set to drop – big time. Lots of people are going to lose a lot of money.
by Alex Evans | Jan 29, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
Last year’s big issue at Davos was climate change – unsurprisingly, given that it was the first time the WEF crowd had convened since the Stern Review was published and An Inconvenient Truth was released. This year, for all the worry about meltdown in financial markets, the big issue was by all accounts scarcity.
Gideon Rachman, writing his weekly column in yesterday’s FT, agrees:
Without a big short-term crisis to distract them, the international politics crowd were able to look at longer-term trends. They too are trying to understand the consequences of globalisation. But while the bankers grapple with the top end of the process – the movement of billions of dollars around the world financial system – the political analysts are increasingly preoccupied by the way globalisation is affecting people at the bottom of the pile. The costs of food and energy are rising fast. The availability of water is also becoming an issue, from Australia to Africa. The struggle for these three basic commodities – food, energy and water – came up repeatedly in Davos.
And he’s not only worried about the problem. Just as much of a concern is whether the world’s institutions and policy elites have the capacity to manage it:
Soccer crowds in England like to abuse match referees by chanting: “You don’t know what you’re doing.” If protesters had been able to get near the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, they could justifiably have aimed the same chant at the world leaders who assembled in the Alps.
These people are meant to be the “masters of the universe”: presidents, prime ministers, bankers, billionaires. If anybody can make sense of world events, it should be them. But the air of confusion in Davos was both palpable and alarming.
Update: rising food prices also got a mention in President Bush’s State of the Union yesterday…
