RUSI Analysis, 26 Jul 2013 By Jennifer Cole, Senior Research Fellow, Resilience & Emergency Management

Now at its third iteration, the UK’s National Risk Register was praised internationally for giving an official stock take of threats and hazards facing the rustic. However, a more proactive Register would help to enlarge the main focus from emergency preparedness and response towards more prevention and vulnerability reduction.  

The UK’s National Risk Register (NRR), an unclassified and public version  of the threats and hazards the rustic faces, is rightly admired by the international community.  Virtually all the threats (man-made attacks equivalent to terrorism and cyber attack) and hazards it lists (natural events resembling flooding, heatwaves and pandemic flu) , require greater than just government action to deal with them. The personal sector operators of electricity companies, water companies, transport utilities and the companies on which any community depends want to plan for and mitigate risks, as do the emergency services and native governments.  In order to take action, they have to be fully conversant in what those risks can be.

Similarly, the more the majority can do to make themselves and their homes resilient, the more resilient their communities and the united kingdom as a complete, turns into. Measures would come with checking whether they live in a space vulnerable to flooding,  understanding simple cyber security practices which includes using strong passwords and spotting obvious attempts at financial fraud, to benefiting from seasonal flu vaccinations. The NRR allows all sectors of society – public sector, private sector, and the general public themselves – to devise and get ready together.

Where the NRR works less well, however, is as an early warning system to drive emergency preparedness and planning well beforehand. The National Risk Assessment (which considers risk on a five-year horizon), and National Security Risk Assessment (which looks further ahead, to 20 years out, and informs the NRA which, in turn, informs the NRR), can be more beneficial in the event that they could move emerging risks onto the NRR more quickly, before their impact is felt other than immediately afterwards. The last two iterations of the register have included four new categories. Three of those (two distinct kinds of volcanic volcano hazards – ash cloud and gas-rich effusion – plus social disruption and wildfires) were added on reflection. They were done only after serious disruption was as a result of such events. Only the fourth category – severe space weather – was added predictively.

Placing Risks at the Register

It is, in fact, difficult if not impossible to foresee the genuinely unexpected – let’s say, the spread of effects following the severe volcanic eruption in Iceland in 2010 .- Nevertheless it must be easier to foretell certain consequences, along with severe pollution or disruption to airline services leaving large numbers of UK citizens stranded overseas and wanting some Foreign and Commonwealth Office assistance. It was not rather a lot the volcanic eruption itself that was the hazard to the united kingdom, however the subsequent disruptive effects it caused. Pollution was a significant issue through the Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak on the turn of this century, because of the large numbers of carcasses burned on open pyres. Moreover, the issue posed by stranded travellers was experienced more recently when severe ice and snow closed the Channel Tunnel in 2009.

We can equally question why it has taken goodbye for wildfires to seem at the register when their frequency and intensity have been steadily increasing over recent years as summers become hotter and drier across ever more northerly areas of Europe. They were particularly fierce inside the UK in 2011 and 2012, but this could were not more unexpected or difficult to foretell on past experience than a flu pandemic.  Had they appeared at the NRR sooner, Local Authorities and native Resilience Forums could have been more inclined to plot a collective response that encompassed the abilities and assets of greater than just the local Fire and Rescue Services. A lot of these risks ‘bubble under’ at the reserve list of the NRSA and NRA before their actual occurrence promotes them, but a lot of the folks who must plan for them don’t always see these longer, classified versions. It is very important consider how the NRR is used, and by whom, in addition to what it represents.

Pandemic flu, as an instance, is a totally specific risk to have at the register, which can easily be expanded to incorporate ‘serious infectious disease’ often. The sort of move would enable among the measures had to mitigate an endemic of any disease to be fully planned for, and would also go far to tackling antimicrobial resistance, that’s currently dealing with the National Security Risk Assessment process for possible inclusion in its own right, to be considered immediately. To have one single infectious disease – influenza – alone on the top of the register, with all less serious diseases considered together in a separate but discrete grouping lower down makes less sense than a gradated scale.

With the above in mind, a very strange decision on this new iteration of the register is the only to mix zoonotic diseases (those who can transfer from animals to humans) with non-zoonotic animal diseases in one ‘animal disease’ category. The response required for an animal health emergency, resembling a Foot and Mouth outbreak or BSE, is considerably different to that required for H5N1, or ‘Bird Flu’ or, actually for the H1N1 strain liable for the hot ‘Swine Flu’ pandemic. The implications of the previous are largely to the security of the food chain and impact at the agricultural industry, while the latter affects human health and the NHS. No matter their origins, the dangers posed by zoonotic diseases correlate more with those from SARS and the present pathogen-du-jour, the coranovirus liable for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). Zoonotic diseases are more such as a food chain supply disruption or environmental contamination.

The way during which the NRR silos threats and hazards doesn’t make explicit the link between the increasing incidence of diseases akin to Blue Tongue or West Nile Fever and climate change: they’re being carried further north as warmer air currents, and more favourable conditions, allow the mosquitoes that carry them to penetrate Northern Europe and North America. If truth be told, the foundation cause – climate change -has brought wildfires onto the NRR. Again, while the Climate Change Risk Assessment feeds the NRA, this would possibly not be explicit to the tip users of the NRR.

A Holistic View of Resilience

Approaching the NRR on this way would help to handle the troubles of the hot Peer Review Report of the uk 2013, Building resilience to disasters: Assessing the implementation of the Hyogo Framework for Action (2005-2015) that the united kingdom must do more to stop, in addition to reply to, emerging risks. It may well do so by making the links between these risks more explicit, which in turn would encourage responses that handle both the causes and the indications and would help to construct resilience from the lowest up in addition to the pinnacle down by enabling emergency planners, responders and community members to take a more holistic view of resilience.

In truth, however, the above points are largely a nitpicking exercise, searching for holes in an approach the united kingdom has pioneered and which it’s largely better at than many other countries. The Civil Contingencies Act is below a decade old, the NRR was public for under half that, and it’s only now that countries comparable to america are following the UK’s example. True resilience will take a little time longer yet to bed down. The Hyogo Peer Review praises our ability to integrate science into policy and rightly commends initiatives equivalent to the Natural Hazards Partnerships, the Local Resilience Forums structure and the willingness to provide the general public a stake of their own resilience.

The UK has come a ways because the ‘Four Fs’ challenges to resilience that happened on the turn of the century: flooding, Foot and Mouth, the Firefighters’ strike and the fuel protests prompted an overhaul of how we approach civil emergencies. There’s still a way to move, however the direction is obvious. Perhaps this can be the time to step back from the NRR and look not just the isolated threats and hazards placed across it, but to take a more holistic view of what links them together, and what are the foundation causes of the vulnerabilities – to create a Venn diagram of the cause and effect of risks in addition to only a graph in their relative likelihood and impact.

This can also encourage a more forward-looking approach at local in addition to national level that assesses the temporal and geographic proximity of risks to the united kingdom and will be prone to place emerging risks at the NRR before their impact is felt. There should still be a volcano that catches us unawares, however the consequences must be foreseeable, if not the cause. Because the Hyogo Peer Review has identified, our next priority must be prevention, strengthening the approach of the National Security Risk Assessment and the National Risk Assessment in order that no event, irrespective of how unexpected, is probably going to catch the united kingdom completely unawares.

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