All right, welcome to season four of Inside My Canoe Head, a daily podcast about individual emergency preparedness, rocking an incredible life, and learning to do the things to make yourself more self-reliant in a chaotic world. Sit back, grab a beverage, and take charge of your life. All right, welcome back to the Ottawa Studios. Thanks for taking the time to join us today on Inside My Canoe Head.
Today, I want to talk to you about scenarios. And the reason we talk about scenarios is when we talk about individual emergency preparedness, you know, we talk to try to keep it in the generalist sense, right? So we're not really worried why the power goes out. We're worried that the power does go out.
And sometimes some people find it difficult to wrap their heads around the idea that the power could go out, but I shouldn't be worried about why the power goes out, right? So if you live in a distinct area that has a significant threat, and you went through some type of hazard identification, you're going to come to the conclusion that I'm at risk to a certain thing. And I interviewed a very good friend of mine a while ago on this podcast, Ian Foss. He's an emergency management professional in British Columbia.
He lives right on or right near the Cascadia Fault. And he is looking at the risk or the hazard of a potential large-scale earthquake causing massive destruction. You can't ignore that that happens when you do a preparedness plan. So these hazards or scenarios or however you want to wrap your head around them, they are real.
So if you live in an area where you have one big, bad, harsh threat that could cause you significant problems if it happens far beyond power outage or water outage or loss of communication or loss of IT or loss of internet or something that we're going to come through on our coming evaluations of the different sectors of critical infrastructure, we can't ignore that. And it's really, really important to consider that in your plan. So today I want to talk about scenarios. How do you figure out what could whack you and your family upside the head?
So, I mean, let's think about it this way. You might have lived in your current location for the fast majority of your life. So you've experienced everything. You've read the news.
You know what people talk about. In essence, you probably already know the big principal threat that you're facing because you've just been there your whole life. It's either happened before, come close to happening, or everybody talks about it. It's kind of like living on the southwestern coast of British Columbia or on Vancouver Island.
You can't have lived there for longer than a couple of years and not had some type of earthquake-related discussion or thought process with somebody. It's just part of the culture. It's ingrained. It's who they are.
It's that important that it's part of the persona of being from that part of the country. That's normal. But what if you're a new immigrant where you're somebody who's moved there from a different part of Canada and you're new to the area and you're not really familiar for what that means? So scenario planning is not always going to be immediately intuitive as to what you might face.
You kind of might have to do a bit of research. Now, if you're short on time, the fastest way to go is to go online to your local emergency management organization and look at their plans. Look to see if they have a specific plan. Google threats to me in here.
Google natural hazards in Winnipeg, and you might have the word flood might show up. Natural hazards in Ottawa, you might have truckers or politicians show up. Probably politicians are more of a threat to our existence here in Ottawa than any other natural hazard, but we do have an earthquake threat. So there are ways without too much investigative work to figure out what that threat is.
And then you've got to place your life in that threat. You know, if you live in a downtown condo on the 20th story in Vancouver, you really probably should understand whether your building you're in is built to code. What is this expect modern code? I mean, what is it expected to be able to withstand?
What is your building's evacuation plan? You know, all the things related to what other people have already thought about related to where you live. That might be a little different than if you live in a marina and you're a live aboard on a sailboat in, you know, Victoria Harbor, for example, and you're facing an earthquake. So if you can see your hazard, your risk profile, even though it's the same hazard, it's going to be a little bit different depending on how you live.
So you kind of juggle these things up in the air and you come up with an idea that, hey, you know what? There's a scenario that could cause me a bleak ton of trouble when the shizzy hits the fizzy. What does my world look like when that happens based upon the choices I've made of how big my family is, all the things about my family, which we've talked about at length on this podcast. And then where do we go from there?
You know, right now you're commuting, you're listening, you got me on in the background, whatever your way of listening to this podcast is. And you just think for a second, you know, I live in an earthquake zone. You know, people didn't think they really lived in that bad of a flood zone in the Fraser Valley until this massive set of floods that happened in lower BC cut off all the lines of communications, destroyed homes and stranded a lot of people for weeks on end. That might not have been the number one threat that they thought they would be facing.
It was probably an earthquake. And a low-bult comes this other thing called a flood and now they're in trouble. That informs your preparedness planning. This scenario that could cause you the most trouble could come to realization or it may not come to realization, but it will inform your preparedness plan and all the things that you take into account.
And then scenarios sometimes are not natural hazard driven. This is the second, but I would argue at times are more important. They're politically driven hazards. And what I mean by that is without going into a long, detailed, deep dive discussion as to what's going on in Ukraine, the international sanctions that have been placed on Russia, good, bad or indifferent, I'll save that discussion for a different day, have effectively closed the export of grain, the world's number one foodstuff of the top and the third or fourth country in the world.
So you're looking at a large amount of the normal feed for the human population export. So not in Russia and Ukraine, but I'm talking about feeding the rest of the world has been sanctioned and shut down by the international agencies, right? And the international governments in the best of intentions. The problem is with grain production, it's very similar to oil.
There simply isn't somebody else to ramp up. You're not going to see in the coming fall, other countries ramp up their grain production to replace that. That is simply a large amount of grain that is now being removed from consumption. Some resource experts are saying we're in a position now post fall.
So, you know, in September, October timeframe, we're going to have food for 6 billion people on this planet. There just happens to be 8 billion. Now that can create huge emergency preparedness scenario planning. If, and I have a lot of listeners in Kenya, I have a lot of listeners on in South Africa and some of the West coast of Africa.
And you start to think about areas of the world that are food insecure in general, for the most part, minor disruptions. The societies have no problem in feeding their populations. But when you have a significant disruption in the availability of food, most nations don't carry more than a couple of months worth of stockpiles of foodstuffs for their nations. So when we start looking into December, 2022, January, 2023, you start to see a scenario emerging where the people of Yemen, the people of Somalia, and to some extent, the people of Sudan, South Sudan, and Ethiopia simply are not going to have sufficient food to eat.
And there is not going to be an international community who has access to replacement food. They are simply not going to have enough to eat. If you remember back in the Arab Spring, the Arab Spring was caused by basically a doubling of grain prices. You can call it out.
They wanted to overthrow the government. No, they were rioting because grain prices doubled in Africa and Libya and Tunisia and places like that or in Egypt specifically. They overthrew international governments because of a doubling of grain prices. Estimations now by the beginning of 2023, you're going to see four to six fold increases in grain prices around the world.
In other words, you're going to see political instability in politically fragile and fragile, maybe unstable, call them countries around the world. You're going to see a great increase in uprising and challenging behavior to government order around the developing and some parts of the developed world as a result of these well-intentioned sanctions put against Russia to punish them for their actions. The subsequent effect of that is you're going to see significant scenarios develop where most of the population probably doesn't realize that it's coming. This is part of where spending some valuable time and being aware of the world around you and the things that are going on and then look at the secondary and tertiary effects of what governments are starting to do, you start to see that other scenarios will develop.
For example, you saw that if you follow globalization, we all collectively knew that globalization started to die in the second half of Bill Clinton's second term. It was greatly accelerated under Bush and Obama and Trump did what Trump did, but basically America has been disengaging from the world for about 25 years on an intentional path to become more isolationist and ditch the global agenda. And so a lot of the world's conflicts and free commerce are starting to be disrupted. Supply chain issues has more to do with the lack of globalization than it has anything to do with a pandemic.
And when you start to realize that how much fragility exists in your society and dependence on things like globalization and supply chain, you start to see more and more of these scenarios start to develop that you probably really weren't aware of. So it's not just necessary. I have an earthquake hazard in Southwest BC. It's when you think about, I have set up a world for good, bad, or indifferent that I have made the tactical choice to become dependent on a whole bunch of products and systems that are dependent on the external world and environment.
And so it becomes a bit more detailed evaluation of your world and your exposure to that world and how international events and developments between nations can influence. Like, I don't know if you've been paying a lot of attention, but there's a significant disruption going on in Florida right now with regard to fungus and disease in citrus crops. Now, right now, that's not affecting all the OJ that's on your shelf, but that in a couple of months, if it comes to fruition, what some experts believe you're going to see a significant spike in the price and a fall in the availability of tropical citrical fruit. Now that may have zero effect on you on your food budget if you don't consume those products, but if you do consume those products and they're an important part of your diet, your food budget is going up.
Why is that important? Well, all of these other costs related to inflation are a scenario in and of themselves that a lot of Canadian families, and I'm sure a lot of families around the world are living very, very close to paycheck to paycheck and all of these individual things build up. Now you have a scenario potentially looming on the future where you may no longer be able to pay for your lifestyle as it's currently constructed and preparedness planning would say, okay, I'm at this rate, at this inflation, at these set of circumstances in the world, I'm probably four months from having to start making changes. Preparedness planning, scenario planning would tell you, I need to start planning for that now.
I may make the changes now, but I at least have to go through the process of planning it out. This is where scenario planning has you looking beyond natural hazards, beyond what your local government may be planning to do, and start looking at your exposure to international events. How does events around the world and bilaterally between countries where you live have a great influence? If you live in a part of the world that requires that your nation is a great importer of food, in other words, your nation does not have the ability to feed itself.
It requires the import of international foodstuffs to be able to feed the population. You need to be figuring out that scenario right now because the importation and therefore the exportation from some countries of international foodstuffs is going to take a hard right turn in the next 12 months and it won't look like it does now. So what I'm trying to say is that you're going to be in a position where your country that is a great importer of food simply might not be able to import food. What's your strategy when that happens?
How are you intending to be able to deal with that scenario? So think about the international world. Think about the natural hazards that you face. Think about what is potentially could happen and then have yourself a conversation in the mirror with that incredibly beautiful or handsome individual.
Grab a piece of paper or a whiteboard and just think your way through it. This is not a catastrophic chicken little sky is falling event, but as part of your scenario, part of planning, part of thinking about preparedness is going through the list of possible things that could happen. What would the, you know, the most dangerous and the most likely outcome be? We try to look at those because those are the two ends of the spectrum.
You have a conversation with yourself. You come up with a plan and you realize at this point, I've spent a grand total of absolutely zero dollars, but I've broadened my understanding of how I can be influenced by external scenarios, especially ones I might not have thought of right off the cuff. If you live in Southwestern BC, you're thinking earthquake. If you live in Louisiana or Corpus Christi, Texas, you're thinking about hurricane.
If you're living in sub-Saharan Africa or you're a humanitarian aid worker in Yemen, you're thinking about the lack of availability of imported foodstuffs. If you're living in Eastern Europe, if you're living in Southeast Asia, you're thinking about how do the operations or how do the shooting war or combat operations influence my ability to get access to the resources I need to live the life I want? And then what are the scenarios when those resources are no longer available? So if you think about scenario planning that way, we always started off with the easy stuff, the big natural stuff.
Then you move on to the real world as you know it. And as the Stoics would say, it's all about understanding the world around you and understanding the things out of your control. You and I are not likely going to intervene and change the course of the Ukrainian war or the coming wars in Southeast Asia. We likely won't be doing that.
But what we can do is make a logical set of decisions. We have power over our actions as a result, if something comes to fruition, that's the power of scenario planning. That's the power of individual emergency preparedness planning. And that's what we do here at Inside My Canoe Head is try to have these discussions and get your mind thinking, hmm, maybe I should consider whether my nation is going to be import food.
If I really am required to eat all of these exotic foods that come from all around the world, or can I zero my life more into a hundred mile, hundred kilometer diet for the majority of my food steps to greater insulate me, I'm still going to eat like a king or queen, but I'm just going to have better control over access to the foods when I want them. These are all great ideas. So keep your comments coming to Inside My Canoe Head. Drop me a line at Jeff at preparednesslabs.ca.
Give me your suggestions on what you think are interesting and neat scenarios that may affect you. Thanks for joining us this week. We'll have another episode coming up on Thursday when we talk about some pretty interesting stuff. So thank you very much.
Stay safe and go out there and rock. and awesome life.