Resilient to what?: a fascinating new look at risk
by Rob Hopkins
I was reading through the Executive Summary of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks 2011 this afternoon (as you do) and the chart on page 3 (see above) caught my eye (click on it to enlarge it). In it, the authors set out all the risks they see in the world on a matrix which positions the various risks by their perceived impact on the global economy and by the perceived likelihood of their happening. What you might expect to be at the top, given recent media reports, would be the threat of terrorism or perhaps some hideous computer virus that knocks out nuclear power station. But no. There at the top, leading the pack, are climate change, ‘extreme energy price volatility’ and fiscal crises.
In my research over the past couple of years on the subject of resilience, I often ended up at the question of ‘resilient to what?’ In a paper for the think tank DEMOS called ‘Resilient Nation’, Charlie Edwards listed the things he felt we should be preparing resilience to. They were climate change, floods, extreme weather events, pandemics, energy shortages, nuclear attacks, terrorism and a few others. The UK government Cabinet Office runs ‘Regional Resilience Teams’ who are charged with creating plans for each region. Yet the main focus of this will most likely be on terrorism and pandemics.
In the Transition movement we have argued for 5 years now that we need to base thinking about resilience primarily on both mitigation and adaptation when it comes to climate change, as well as to peak oil and the volatility of energy prices and, more recently, to the economic troubles affecting us. We have argued that planning for resilience without these concerns at the forefront runs a high risk of really rather missing the point. Indeed, we have argued for a different take on the whole notion of resilience, one that says that rather than it being about what do we need to put in place so that we can just about survive when something extremely ghastly occurs, perhaps building resilience could be seen as a positive process.
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