For those concerned about climatic hazards, the news is not good. Climate Change 2007, the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has just been released, following close on the heels of the UK’s Stern Report on the economic impacts of climate change. Both paint a grim picture:
Warming of the global climate is unequivocal … numerous long-term changes in climate have been observed. These include … aspects of extreme weather, including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves and the intensity of tropical cyclones… These are very likely to become more frequent. (IPCC 2007)
The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Stern et al, 2006) emphasizes that the world has to act now or ‘face devastating economic consequences’. On 17 April 2007, the UK put climate change on the agenda of the United Nations Security Council, arguing that it threatened global security. This was not supported by all Security Council members, but follows a number of reports carrying similar warnings – for example, a report by the US Center for Naval Analysis (2007) and a London conference quoted from the BBC:
Global warming could exacerbate the world’s rich–poor divide and help to radicalize populations and fan terrorism in the countries worst affected, security and climate experts said on Wednesday. ‘We have to reckon with the human
propensity for violence’, Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain’s former ambassador to the United Nations, told a London Conference on Climate Change: The Global Security Impact. (RUSI, 2007)
These scientific reports and comments, and many like them, are strongest on the changes reflected in technical climatic and weather measurements, and the reasons for these. However, for many people, especially those living in the northern arctic, sub- arctic and temperate regions, the changes to their environments have been dramatic (CIEL, 2007), threatening livelihoods and, in some cases, people’s existence. The potential impacts on the hundreds of millions living at or near sea level have been the main focus of mainstream climate change scenarios. Added to the threat of sea-level rise is the possibility of more cyclones (hurricanes/typhoons) and floods, and, in other areas, extended droughts and permanent water deficits. The impacts on agriculture of higher temperatures and more frequent extremes, including large wildfires, may undermine food production and threaten to shift some areas to a state of permanent crisis. Storm intensity is likely to increase in many areas.
Changes or variability in the climate are only part of the picture, however.
Widespread environmental and water contamination is likely in the future, related to disruption through weather events, but also simply from expanding population and industrialization, putting more people closer to more hazardous industries and contaminants.
As set out in Chapter 1, it is trends in the exposure and vulnerability of people that are (or should be) firmly within the ambit of emergency management. If they are not, emergency management is likely to be constrained to responding to emergencies of escalating scale and complexity. Many of these trends were discussed in Chapter 1, some of which are listed below:
• Population increase and, importantly, its distribution: globally, this affects a dispro- portionate number of poor people, dependants (children and youth) and people living in hazardous locations with marginal livelihoods.
• Urbanization creates mass concentrations of humans and economic activity: the potential for most types of emergencies is increased, with greater impacts on more people; but simultaneously, the capacity to plan and deal with them may be increased.
• Conflict, whether over resources, ideologies, ethnic division or without clear rationale, destroys resilience by damaging livelihoods and food sources, forces mass displacement and redirects resources from productive use. Conflict creates crises while often undermining emergency management and other capacities to react.
• The breakdown of governance and institutions removes much capacity for organ- ized emergency management and undermines the resilience of economies and communities, whether through reduced capacity or rising corruption.
• Uncertainty: it appears that there is increasing uncertainty on all fronts, whether geophysical, economic, social values, political, legal or administrative.
• Inequity and vulnerability: in addition to the trends listed above, vulnerable groups are being created through employment conditions, access to healthcare and displacement for other forms of development.
We can reasonably ask how well emergency management does today, and whether it has the policy and institutional capacity to cope with these trends and forecasts.
In summary – taking a broad definition of emergency management to include all involved, such as non-governmental groups – it does extraordinarily well in many parts of the world despite the fact that things occasionally go wrong even in well- resourced areas. Nevertheless, the picture is very patchy, with the emphasis generally on media-friendly, high-profile responses, and with limited attention given to other parts of the emergency management function: prevention, preparedness and long-term recovery. Addressing prevention, and improving resilience or reducing vulnerability, often requires fundamental change, challenges major power interests and may disrupt the status quo. Under these circumstances, it is therefore likely to be resisted. Failure to address this basic developmental challenge in many parts of the world will result in increasingly large losses of life, livelihoods, and economic assets and activity.
There is a plausible but worst-case scenario of far greater frequency and magni- tude of emergencies and disasters, at all scales, in both rich and poor areas, and grossly insufficient capacities. However, scenarios that are less alarming, with nega- tive impacts but of lesser magnitude, will, nonetheless, threaten emergency response capacity and still see increasing disruption and increasing pressures on society’s ability to cope. So, all other things being equal, many areas will struggle to handle disasters in the future. The policy and institutional challenge may or may not be overwhelm- ing; but it will certainly be far from trivial.
Viewed globally, key deficiencies with contemporary emergency management that limit abilities to deal with today’s circumstances, and therefore even more so in the future, include:
• a preoccupation with response to particular events at the expense of other elements of emergency management;
• a lack of strategic policy development, leaving emergency managers and commu- nities constrained within existing policy and institutional capacities;
• reorienting of emergency management to focus more on issues of national secu- rity, especially related to threats of terrorism, which may be at the expense of emergency management’s capacity to deal with other, and generally larger, risks;
• privatization of emergency management functions with a consequent emphasis on profit rather than safety; this is seen in response and in some forms of preven- tion, rather than emphasizing all approaches, including the relatively low-cost measures taken by individuals;
• increasing issues of confidentiality that security and privatization bring, with consequent decline likely in cross-sector cooperation and accessibility of infor- mation and policy processes;
• difficulties in learning and capacity-building across events, and maintaining political mainstream profile and support;
• building resilience may be hindered by established interests; related to this is the question of the appropriate balance between anticipatory and resiliency approaches.
The question arises as to how stable these factors are. Could there be sudden change,
with some becoming much more important or other factors appearing? The answer must be, yes, as evidenced by the counter-terrorism emphasis that appeared so immediately after the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US and, to a lesser extent, the sudden interest in tsunamis following the 26 December 2004 Asian event. Sudden climate impacts, disease outbreaks, civil or military conflict – any such disruptions, depending on where they impact – could reorient the policy discussion and direction.
The reorientation could be positive, such as a focus on resilience in the wake of wider appreciation of the threats of climate change, or negative, such as a narrowing of the agenda to focus on security.
To further develop policy and institutional capacities in it own domain, emer- gency and disaster management – whether severely affected by these deficiencies or not – intersects with a broader policy environment driven by its own particular trends.
Policy styles vary from country to country and are not stable over time, so a detailed analysis is neither possible here, nor would it be likely to apply for long.
Such volatility is normal in the political realm and is particularly pronounced in a policy domain such as disasters, where sudden events and reactions to them can shift agendas and priorities so quickly. Indeed, one challenge for the emergencies and disasters field is to maintain a close engagement within the policy community in order to be aware of shifts in policy style and therefore to be capable of responding to shifts, or even to influence policy shifts, rather than simply reacting after the fact.
Such a ‘mainstreaming’ of disasters as a policy issue within the institutional system was discussed in Chapter 8. In monitoring shifts in the policy and institutional operating environment of emergency and disaster management, important trends in policy and institutional styles include the following balances between:
• public and private provision of policy advice, information, management services, etc. in relevant sectors affecting emergencies and disasters (the neo-liberal turn in public policy has profoundly influenced many sectors, and whether this trend will continue, stabilize or reverse will be an important determinant of policy approaches admitted and capacities that can be developed);
• specifically, the relative advocacy and acceptability of different policy instruments, and the choices between regulatory, self-regulatory, market-based, educative and community-based approaches (the balance between coercion, collaboration and sermonizing has shifted during recent decades and will doubtless continue to evolve);
• centralization and devolution of public policy and, thus, emergency manage- ment policy responsibilities and operational functions (this is also known as the subsidiarity debate in governance – including both the government and non- governmental sectors);
• types of policy formulation and the degree to which inclusive processes of policy formulation (as opposed to operational implementation) are encouraged or permitted, thus determining problem-framing and thereby the trajectory of instrument choice, implementation style, etc.;
• the responsibility and influence of international policy and institutions in the
disaster field versus that retained by national and sub-national levels;
• the relative weight given to other major social and policy issues, which may strengthen or diminish the priority and attention given to disasters (these issues include social equity, free trade, economic growth and efficiency, security, and environment and sustainability);
• in particular, the trend in economic and human development policy that ranges from the extremes of reliance on macro-economic (structural adjustment and institutional reform) to reliance on community-scale ‘bottom-up’ development and resilience.
Reflecting on this complex and unstable policy environment, and given that there is no reason to believe that event frequency and/or magnitude will decrease, but rather that it will noticeably increase, the future for disaster policy and its institutional setting lies somewhere between current inadequacies being somewhat exacerbated, and catastrophic breakdown of capacities. The next section identifies major policy and institutional challenges that can be expected if the future falls about midway between these extremes.
Key challenges
For all levels of emergencies, countries where governments seek legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens will generally be better served by emergency management. In large part, this is because such countries are likely to have institutions dedicated to the task of public safety that are reasonably effective, at least at the routine level. Accountability through elections is an obvious factor; however, legitimacy may be sought either through democratic processes or in other ways, such as strong propaganda.
Here, we set out some of the challenges likely to face emergency manage- ment under the three levels developed earlier of routine, non-routine and complex unbounded events.
Routine emergencies
In the West and in many countries with strong institutions, routine emergencies are well handled. There is effective response, a degree of planning and recovery support from both government and non-government sectors. Looking forward, though, these countries may be close to practical limits of capacities in terms of prevention, as well as response, although there are always opportunities for prevention through evolving technology and changing priorities and social values.
However, for many people around the world, emergency management (including response for events widely considered routine) is limited at best. Although this situation is seen most in locations with weak institutions, or which are poor, it is also found in parts of otherwise rich countries. The need here is for the establish- ment and maintenance of effective emergency management institutions, the general features of which are well known from the experience of comparable countries with better institutional development.
Non-routine emergencies
The situation for non-routine emergencies is generally similar to that for routine emergencies, with some important differences. Since such emergencies are far less frequent than routine events, relevant aspects of emergency management may be relatively neglected compared with those for the more routine. Planning and prevention will typically require cooperation across agencies in order to be effective.
This can be said for routine emergencies, too; but with such lower magnitude occurrence, single-agency management is often adequate, even if not ideal.
In non-routine events, the limits of response capacity will frequently be rapidly reached in an environment where spare capacity, whether for monitoring safety regu- lations or for handling casualties, is seen as inefficient and wasteful. An institutional capacity to harness all aspects of government and non-government resources may be the key to achieving results, including with prevention and preparedness activi- ties. Prevention, for example, will often require active participation from a range of agencies and sectors outside the traditional emergency management mainstream, and will frequently intersect with the institutions of the law and economy, both to remove impediments and to draw on the policy instruments and coercive or incen- tive capacities that these institutions provide.
Very large-scale non-routine events will merge with some of the characteristics of complex unbounded emergencies – for example, intensive media and political interest and the associated large flows of aid. Such attention is likely to increase with the still-expanding global reach of live media. Even though the attention brings its own problems, lack of interest makes it more difficult for emergency management to justify its efforts and to maintain its resources and capacities between events.
Complex unbounded events
Almost by definition, planning, preparedness and anticipatory approaches will be inadequate, critical resources will be in short supply and political sensitivity will be heightened. Being a rich democracy is no guarantee of successful management for complex unbounded emergencies. Countries and regions may be very wealthy, but lack the institutions needed for management of complex or even otherwise simple but large-scale emergencies.
Perhaps paradoxically, such events often attract intense international media coverage and international, governmental, NGO and individual support, reducing the need to rely largely on local institutional capacity. This is particularly the case for response and some aspects of recovery. It may be far from perfect; but argu- ably the internationalization of emergency management is one approach to deal- ing with inadequate local institutional capacity and with the problems posed by exceptionally large and complex events. This is not to downplay efforts to build local capacity, which is needed most for routine emergencies – local capacity by definition will almost always be inadequate in the face of a complex, unbounded disaster. There may be limits to the strategy of internationalization, however, includ- ing ‘donor fatigue’ and an increasing demand for the development of local capacity after repeated calls for assistance, whether in the same jurisdiction or not. Positively, these limits can perhaps be turned into a driver for the large-scale human develop-
ment agenda needed to attend the gross inequities, poverty and lack of livelihood security that exist in too many parts of the world.
Further challenges are thinking ahead, decision-making in a complex environ- ment full of uncertainties, and the harnessing of resources from across society and internationally for recovery. In preparation, and to reduce the impact of such emer- gencies, the challenge is to build resilient institutions, organizations and communi- ties, while accepting that anticipatory approaches are of most value for problems that are foreseen and well defined.
International and regional leadership
The international dimension has long been the province of NGOs such as Oxfam, the Red Cross/Crescent Societies and now multilateral agencies led by the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction and the World Bank’s new Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, as well as many other groups, prominent or low profile, and active at all phases of emergency management. However, prevention and preparedness continue to receive relatively limited attention despite rhetoric regarding sustainable livelihoods. Redressing this imbalance remains a major challenge. One hopeful sign is the effort devoted to installing warning systems following the Asian tsunami under UN auspices, with leadership provided by former US presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush senior.
Some argue that this money would be better spent elsewhere; nevertheless, it shows what can be achieved through strong leadership, utilizing the window of policy opportunity following a major disaster.
Global-level support of this kind is high profile and well resourced. There is much opportunity for increased involvement of neighbouring countries, rather than from distant agencies in every aspect of emergency management. Land borders invite cross-jurisdictional emergencies. More emphasis on regional support and cooperation is emerging and is logical, at least from the perspectives of geogra- phy, shared history and tradition, problems and logistics. Some of the vignettes in Chapter 1 illustrate this: the Asian tsunami, flooding in Mozambique and refugees in Goma. Formal and informal arrangements exist in Europe (including by utility companies) and are now part of the agenda at heads of government meetings in Asia and the Pacific.