Disastrous Floods as Indicators of Systemic Risk Neglect
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 7 Feb 2011
Anthony Judge – TRANSCEND Media Service
Implications for Authoritative Response to Future Surprises
Introduction
This is an exploration of the level of neglected risk visibly and dramatically highlighted by a number of recent highly publicized floods which have been framed as unforeseeable surprises. At the time of writing the prime example is in Australia on the occasion of the Queensland flood of 2010,which has been followed by flooding in Victoria. Other examples have included flooding on the French Atlantic coast in 2010 and in the UK in 2009. Disasters involving flooding have included those related to the Asian tsunmi of 2004. (Wikipedia offers a checklist of floods by country).
The question raised here is the level of risk to which “normal” activity prior to the flood is assumed to be exposed in relation to the level of risk which is made apparent by the disaster — even though it is assumed that “normal” activity can be resumed thereafter.
Since “flood” is frequently used as a metaphor to describe other phenomena which may be experienced as disastrous, a further question is whether these imply inappropriate assumptions about risk levels and avoidance of recognition of risk. The same may be asked of phenomena based on a “dearth” of resources rather than the excess associated with “flood”. The remedial focus on return to “normality” is then to be equated with the attitude of “business as usual”. This is now widely deprecated as inadequate to systemic challenges of governance — despite its uncritical celebration by the World Economic Forum (Davos, 2011), following the financial crisis of 2008-2009 in which the markets were “flooded” with “toxic assets”.
These questions highlight the manner in which risks are framed by authorities, with the complicity of specialists and vested interests, and promoted as acceptable to the population, possibly to be enshrined in policies, legislation or other regulatory measures. Such issues relating to surprises of the present are highly relevant to assumptions made about risks of the decades to come. Associated arguments have been developed by Karen A. Cerulo (Never Saw It Coming: cultural challenges to envisioning the worst, 2006) and Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: the impact of the highly improbable, 2007).
The set of signs by which road traffic “self-organizes” and “self-governs” is explored in an Annex (Being in the Flow on Strategic Highways and Byways: enabling sustainable self-governance through traffic signage, 2011) as a source of indications of relevance to navigating other flow systems characterized by a degree of risk. Such a perspective, from the theory of signage systems, raises the question as to how it might be applied more generally to elicit the signs and symbols of requisite scope for sustainable governance of the global environment.
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This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 7 Feb 2011.
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