Moving from Resilience to Antifragile - IAEM 2021

Creating the antifragile emergency manager has many challenges. We must open the conversation about resiliency with an eye on how modern disasters are increasingly complex. Today we are facing unknown risks as new types of disasters and crises appear on the world stage. The emergency manager must approach climate change and climate variability as they do for any other disaster. We must face both the Gray Rhino and the Black Swan events with a level of clarity, even as we have an incomplete understanding of its impact globally. We must consider the challenges of interconnected risks and the resulting cascading disasters. These events are dramatically changing in scope, severity, and impact. The changes in global emergency and crisis management are driven by a combination of global risks (globalization, urbanization, and climate vulnerability) and social and economic risks (aging, a larger gap between the rich and the poor, disaggregation of infrastructure, especially in urban areas, and gaps in education and medical accesses). We will explore the increasing interconnected risks. These connections lead to larger and more complex disasters such as Katrina and the tripartite (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disruptions) of the Tohoku Disaster, which seriously challenges traditional governance's existing capabilities, policy, and institutional structures for effective disaster management. And we will inspect the impacts of modern cascading and synergistic disasters are often the result of unanticipated and unappreciated global to local risks and systems linkages that occur for various reasons.