RiskUKOctober2017

A 21st Century Crisis: What Does It
Look Like in the Real World?
The threats and
dangers we’re facing
are developing and
mutating at an almost
inconceivable pace.
It’s a paradox that, at
a time when the world
has never been safer,
it has also never been
in as great a danger.
David Rubens focuses
on six key areas of
interest – among them
pandemics and
terrorism – before
examining the
implications for
today’s practising risk
and security
management
professionals
Dr David Rubens DSyRM CSyP
FSyI MSc: Managing Director of
Deltar Training Solutions
62
www.risk-uk.com
Every morning seems to bring to light a new
crisis that’s bigger, more destructive and
more expensive to fix than anything that
came before it. Whether it’s hurricanes, cyber
failures, pandemic scares or infrastructural
breakdown, the impact those events have on
both the local communities involved and global
awareness is of a different level of intensity to
that ascribed to what could be considered
‘traditional’ crisis events.
The question is whether this is just some
anomaly, or whether the world is actually
changing in terms of the threats we’re facing
and the challenges they’re posing.
Here at Deltar, we use the phrase ‘21st
Century Crisis Management’ quite a lot,
because in our minds there has been a
significant change in the last 20 years between
20th Century crisis events, which were
relatively isolated, manageable and limited,
and 21st Century crisis events. The latter are of
a different order of magnitude in terms of their
complexity and consequences and encompass
much larger ‘footprints of destruction’.
We’ve identified six areas of significant
interest where there has been an important
evolution in the nature of threats associated
with those sectors, and the implications arising
for strategic planners as well as emergency and
crisis response managers. These are natural
disasters, Critical National Infrastructure (CNI),
pandemics, political and/or social unrest, cyber
failures and terrorism. Let’s look at each in turn.
Natural disasters
Whether or not one accepts the reality of
climate change, it’s clear that not only are high
impact natural disasters – ie typhoons,
tornadoes, floods, earthquakes and landslides
– becoming more frequent and of a larger scale,
but they’re also having a much larger impact on
significantly large sections of the population.
This is only going to increase as the developing
‘mega cities’ are concentrated either on the
coast or in coastal regions, which means that
increasingly dramatic adverse weather events
are going to have an effect on those areas and
the populations living in them.
By their very nature, natural disasters are
‘long-tailed’ events, which have high levels of
often catastrophic impacts not just on the
communities they strike, but also on the
surrounding infrastructure (eg roads, railways,
power, communications and water purification).
In the UK, CNI is officially listed as including
chemicals, civil nuclear communications,
defence, emergency services, energy, finance,
food, Government, health, space, transport and
water. However, from a strategic risk
management perspective, these different
sectors are increasingly becoming
interdependent, with serious disruptions to one
sector likely to have cascading impacts across
the other sectors as well.
An example of failure in CNI can be seen in
the increasingly regular occurrence of power
disruption across large areas, often
transcending national boundaries and
jurisdictions. The highly complex
interconnectedness in power systems means
that a relatively minor disruption in one part of
the system can create almost instantaneous
cascading failures across other systems which
had no knowledge of – or control over – the
original triggering event.
The major power failure across Europe back
in 2006 is a typical example. Following what
was seen as a minor outage due to an
unusually high power flow in a sub-station in
Germany, 28 seconds later an electrical
blackout had cascaded across Europe
extending from Poland in the North East to the
Benelux countries and France in the West,
through to Portugal, Spain and Morocco in the
South West and across to Greece and the
Balkans in the South East.
What about pandemics?
It could be said that the last true pandemic was
the influenza outbreak between 1918 and 1920
that infected 500 million people across the
world, including those in remote Pacific Islands
and in the Arctic, and caused the death of
between 50 million and 100 million people (up
to 5% of the global population at the time).
However, the growth of international travel
combined with the return of previously
declining diseases, not to mention the rapid
expansion of urbanisation, means that many
observers consider it only a matter of time until
another global pandemic hits us.
There have been increasing warnings of the
impact a significant outbreak could have, with
AIDS, SARS, Ebola, Swine Flu, Bird Flu and Zica