By Randolph Kent | Tue., March 22, 12:22 PM | Comments ( 1 )
Emergency workers walk past survivors sitting near debris in Rikuzentakata, Iwate prefecture, Japan, Mar. 18, 2011. REUTERS/Aly Song
Dr. Randolph Kent is director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King’s College, London. The opinions expressed are his own.
The capacity for mitigating the impact of events such as the multiple crises in Japan is increasing dramatically, but governments and the UN system are failing to take the right course of action. Japan's agony offers us key lessons as the world faces a future of increasing vulnerability.
The abiding lesson globally of Japan's present calamity is that so many of the risks that the world will face can be anticipated. However, the commitment to take appropriate action to identify plausible crises and to take appropriate preventative and preparedness action is lacking.
The earthquake, its aftershocks, the tsunami, the nuclear emergency and their potential financial costs illustrate what a 'synchronous failure' could look like, namely, a mega-crisis stemming from a multi-dimensional system's collapse. It is a type of failure for which the international community will increasingly have to prepare, one which has to begin with ever more sophisticated ways of anticipating and analyzing risks and ways to reduce them, and one in which humanitarian assistance – in such forms as long-term post-traumatic support and sustained radiation recovery treatments – will increasingly be on an ever-growing 'emergency supplies list'.
Analysts report Japan's tragedy as a cataclysm affecting a 'highly sophisticated developed nation'. This characterisation in many respects misses two lessons we should be learning: first, that vulnerabilities inevitably affect all states because of the increasingly interactive nature of future crises and the stark similarities that underlie all such tragedies; and second, the extraordinary opportunity the Japanese crisis offers to urge the international community to prepare far more proactively and effectively for such future humanitarian challenges."
Too little time is spent by policy-makers generally on speculating about the ways the interactive nature of risks, the ways that threats for which we might be prepared may interact with other crisis drivers for which we are not prepared. Those with humanitarian roles and responsibilities too often fail to look for the interconnections between one crisis driver and others, and with that in mind also fail to use the insights provided by the sciences to identify new types of crisis threats and possible solutions.
Arising out of Japan's calamity needs to come a new approach towards anticipating and dealing with the increasingly complex dynamics of new and traditional types of crisis threats. This is a challenge ever increasing in its implications. The question is, to what extent will a world seemingly spellbound by Japan's agony respond to such crises of the future?
On the ground it is evident that even in such a highly sophisticated and well prepared society as Japan, the impact of natural hazards on infrastructure can quickly lead to outcomes normally associated with poorer countries -- large-scale food shortages, water and shelter crises and logistics collapse. And while electricity, roads and essential supplies are being restored, hundreds of thousands of people are "internally displaced," afraid of being exposed to radioactive fallout or just with no home to go to.
There can be no doubt that Japan's level of crisis prevention and preparedness offers a standard that few other countries can match, but that nevertheless, as the crisis plays itself out, there inevitably will be a growing number of faults that will be found even in such an "iconic system" and the way it was managed.
What one has to take from this seminal event is that the types of crisis drivers which the international community will have increasingly to face not only will grow in number but will also grow in complexity. The erosion of infrastructures, the consequences of cybernetic failures and growing interconnectedness are but three factors that will expose human vulnerabilities around the world.
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