For anyone trying to model a post-Covid understanding of the risk environment we are going to be operating in 2021-25, it is clear that ‘The future is now'.
The range of risks and threats have already transcended anything we would have been planning for in 2015-2020 - and that trend is only going to increase.
If the buzz word for 2001-2010 was 'crisis' and the buzzword from 2011-2017 was 'resilience', the word that is now at the centre of our risk modelling is 'unprecedented'.
47 /116 degree heat waves in Canada; 55 /130 degrees heat as a matter of normalcy in Middle East; weather patterns that are unprecedented in intensity, scale and duration; infrastructure fragility that means that our cities are constantly on the edge of 'black sky' failures; global supply chain vulnerability; hyper-dependent / hyper-complex global financial systems that no one has control of; cyber vulnerability that means that every aspect of our lives is open to attack at any time, and overhanging all of this, the impacts of climate change and global warming that means that all of our coastal cities are facing the reality of life under water as a looming reality.
The July ISRM Global Roundtable brings together four leading thinkers and policy-makers who are actively engaging with those challenges
Lord Toby Harris, ISRM President and Chair, UK Preparedness Commission
Xavier Castellanos, Under Secretary-General IFRC, who is leading the IFRC Urban Resilience and Strategy 2030 programme
Dr Marqueza Cathalina L Reyes, Academic Programme Director, Asian Institute of Management (Philippines)
Nadine Sulkowski, University of Gloucester Project Lead, Erasmus Project BUiLD (Building Universities for Leadership in Disaster Resilience)
Join us for what will be a significant exploration of the challenges we are facing, and some of the possible options we have for responding to and managing the risks and threats that define our new reality.
