Discussion Forums » Topic of the Month
Topic for April 2021 - Disaster Planning
-
The proposed agenda for this month's discussion 'Disaster Planning – What should the UK plan for in the future?' is:
Agenda
Based on our recent experience with the pandemic what sort of Disasters or major disruptions should we expect the Government to be planning for? Which do we think they are planning for and what might they have overlooked?
What areas of particular concern can we identify under the following categories?
- Natural Environment Disasters
- Progressive disasters e.g. Climate Change
- Food and Water shortages
- Single instance disasters
- Biological disasters
- Warfare and terrorism disasters
- Scientific and Technological Disasters and unintended consequences
- Infrastructure Disasters
- Economic Disasters
- Political Disasters – Geopolitical and UK
- Demographic and behavioural disasters
- Extra-terrestrial disasters
- ‘Failure to act’ disasters
- Other
What National Disaster Planning and Risk Management Infrastructure exists?
How much goes on that we are not aware of? Do we think every area we have identified does have someone responsible for disaster contingency planning and resilience planning?
What can we learn from the Covid-19 pandemic?
Which sort of disasters can be handled by ability to react quickly as opposed to stockpiling of essential goods or materials?
How do we balance Existential disasters v High Probability disasters v High Impact disasters v Cost/Time to implement contingency plans? How do we manage risk and different people’s appetite for risk and understanding of risk? Is it a combination of ‘Impact level’/’Probability Level’/’Ability, Cost & Time to respond’ that determines where we put our priorities.
How do we make heroes of those that avert potential disasters as well as those that solve them if they happen? How do we get politicians to focus as much on the long-term as the short-term?
This post was edited by # Probably42 at April 13, 2021 5:15 PM BST - Natural Environment Disasters
-
What we sort of mentioned but didn't really cover were 'super-spreaders' or space junk. This defunct near earth material may collide with something useful (say carrying GPS or weather data) thus rendering it useless or inoperable. Yes there is the data danger here on earth and in our oceans but some of the data danger above our heads needs to be considered too.
They say a picture speaks a thousand words - if so feast your minces on this => http://astria.tacc.utexas.edu/AstriaGraph/ - be warned - it's not pleasant.