This post examines the issue of preparedness for and response to high-impact weather events, a discipline that is loosely referred to as disaster studies. Disaster studies includes the study of community resilience or how communities can be better prepared to mitigate and prepare for risks.
One of the reasons that disasters are so difficult to address is because they often affect a widespread area and can only thoroughly be addressed in the international arena. On the international level, a number of initiatives have been put forth to draw attention to these issues from a variety of agencies. The high number of natural disasters that are occurring in the world today have motivated the community to address how the risk of disasters can be reduced through combating global warming, because the two disciplines are interrelated. The United Nations put forth a pair of initiatives using recent disasters as case studies to examine the damage caused and to extract lessons learned. The United Nations has a stake in promoting enhanced disaster preparedness, because disasters present a large obstacle to achieving their overarching initiative to end global poverty, the Millennium Development Goals. The poor are often most vulnerable in disasters because they have less of a safety net to help them survive and rebuild. The World Bank is also concerned with issues of global poverty, so the institutions put forth an implementation report, “Stockholm Plan of Action for Integrating Disaster Risk and Climate Change Impact in Poverty Reduction”. The report resulted from a meeting of 200 stakeholders to endorse the proposal and message of need for response to climate change disasters because they exacerbate world poverty. The international community has a responsibility to address these issues on a macro level, not only because of their commitment to combating global poverty but also because disasters often impact multiple countries and large-scale aid must be coordinated among them.
Global change requires a coordinated shift in mindset and a willingness to take action, but change is gradual and can only be inspired by events or by education. The International Standards Organization (ISO) has played an important role by releasing a number of standards to address the need for standardization and best practices to better address catastrophes. As previously mentioned, this discipline is emerging and therefore draws upon a variety of existing disciplines. The standards that apply to disaster studies include ISO 31000, which covers risk management and ISO 22301, which applies to business continuity from the umbrella of societal security. Education of professionals through standardization, and by extension the public, is intended to contribute to the creation of behavioral norms. These norms will enable society to face disasters more effectively.
Many governments around the world have released national standards to improve resiliency across the disciplines of emergency management and business continuity planning including NFPA 1600 in the United States, CSA Z1600 in Canada, BS25999 in the United Kingdom, SS-540 in Singapore, and AZ 5050 in Australia and New Zealand. In the United States, there are several ways in which the government has worked to enhance preparedness. The Department of Homeland Security oversees continuity of operations for the public sector to ensure that the government will be prepared for times of need. It released Federal Continuity Directives 1 and 2 (FCD-1 and FCD-2) to regulate preparedness in the public sector. Under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency(FEMA) is commissioned with preparing for and responding to disasters within the United States. After the attack of September 11, 2001, FEMA was merged into the newly formed Department of Homeland Security in order to better integrate the response to high-impact events of all kinds. When Hurricane Katrina hit in August of 2005 and was officially recorded as the worst natural disaster ever to happen on United States soil, the agency was challenged in new ways. The leadership has since learned valuable lessons from their widely perceived failure to cope with Hurricane Katrina effectively leading to the release of the 2006 Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act. In many ways, the incident served as a catalyst for disaster preparedness innovation. Under the leadership of Craig Fugate, the agency has pioneered ways to work in closer connection with the private sector to increase the speed, quality, and efficiency of response. Following on the heels of Hurricane Katrina, FEMA released the Voluntary Private Sector Preparedness Accreditation and Certification Program (PS‑Prep) mandated by Title IX of the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007. The program is an attempt to incentivize private sector organizations to standardize their disaster preparedness, emergency management, and business continuity programs. The government has made this a priority because the United States is unique in that the private sector plays a large role in critical infrastructure, or as stated by the Department of Homeland Security:
Partnership between the public and private sectors is essential, in part because the private sector owns and operates approximately 85% of the nation’s critical infrastructure, government agencies have access to critical threat information, and each controls security programs, research and development, and other resources that may be more effective if discussed and shared, as appropriate, in a partnership setting. The initiative has been somewhat controversial and it remains to be seen whether the government will be able to take control of the preparedness agenda. The private sector has ideas of its own.
The private sector has independently addressed disaster studies in its own way under the discipline of business continuity management. Business continuity management is an integrated solution combining the disciplines of:
(1) emergency management, which deals with life safety issues immediately following the incident itself,
(2) business continuity, which deals with facility concerns and relocation services,
(3) disaster recovery, which deals with the recovery of information technology, and
(4) crisis management, which deals with communication strategy during the incident and recovery.
Private sector preparedness is becoming a best-practice recommendation and increasingly a requirement from customers just for doing business. The private sector has prepared itself by creating a profession for preparedness that determines best practice through individual professionalization. Business continuity focuses on providing a framework for organizations to recover from disasters of all kinds. It focuses on daily management and planning for recovery to make the process as seamless as possible. For example, if there is a fire in a factory and it has been determined that all personnel are safe, the business continuity department is in charge of implementing a plan to restore critical business functions and eventually, a full operational recovery. As is the case with any industry or department that handles crisis, there is a high level of regulation and as it matures, the industry is experiencing the emergence of standardization. Ever practical, the business world addresses the effects that have to be addressed following an event as a separate discipline from the analysis of the causes of the events, which is known as risk management.
The business continuity discipline is related to, but distinct from, risk management, which focuses on prevention and mitigation of known risks. The primary difference between business continuity and risk management is that business continuity does not deal with causes, but deals with the effects after an incident. The topic of risk management has its own body of literature, which is related to the disaster preparedness discipline. Perhaps one of the most influential recent books in the risk management field is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan. It explains how humans are unable to predict high impact events before they happen using predictions based on the past and so the discipline needs to grow more flexible. One of the key traits of people during disasters is risk resistance, which builds up as individuals and communities grow used to specific types of incidents and stop worrying about them as much as they probably should. Evidence of this mentality is common in hurricane-prone areas in which people do not always heed mandatory evacuations because perhaps they evacuated the last time there was an incident and nothing happened. They then refuse to evacuate when another incident comes up, even though there is no relationship between these two events. This type of mentality is typical of the type of risk that risk managers have to deal with and educate the public about.
Risk managers are tasked with preparing for known and suspected risks, even if they seem inconceivable. Climate change is one of those risks. Increasingly the framing has changed to indicate that disasters are not the mere result of weather, but are the responsibility of people if they are unable to adequately prepare. The argument is being built that disasters, even natural ones, are manmade if society fails to prevent them. If society’s leaders are unable to adequately mitigate, prepare for, and respond to natural incidents, it follows that those disasters are manmade. The argument that disasters are preventable even though events may not be is the foundation upon which the discipline of disaster studies is built. This change in mindset has been evident in court rulings following natural disasters including the original court ruling holding the Army Corps of Engineers responsible for the flooding of New Orleans because of the breaching of the levies and more recently, the investigation concluding that the nuclear disaster at Fukushima was preventable.
This change in mindset is about encouraging better preparedness, thereby reducing the economic consequences of disasters. The economic effects can be disastrous and several studies have been done to attempt to measure them on a case-by-case basis. In addition to the damage caused by the initial event, there are often breakdowns in infrastructure and services that prolong the impact. That impact can be difficult to fully quantify. Resilience is a difficult concept to measure and the economic valuation of post-disaster situations is still a new field that is in need of further study.
Resilience is not only an economic concept, but one that can also be taught to a community through non-financial means. One of the most important priorities for changing mindsets is to enact social change to build resiliency awareness. The general public must be educated about what to do in a disaster. But sometimes the public has lessons to teach the professionals as well. One of these lessons is that a community with strong social capital, no matter their economic standing, is more likely to recover quickly. The value of social capital cannot be underestimated for response to and recovery from disasters. Communities and community leadership can make all the difference in determining whether recovery, including the return of displaced populations, will occur following an incident. That leadership has an opportunity to use social capital to rebuild in a better, more sustainable way.
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