Coronavirus should be used to prepare for more mega-disasters

Jeff Schlegelmilch, Deputy Director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, is convinced that the COVID-19 pandemic will not be the only "mega-disaster" we will face, especially in a world increasingly exposed to climate change and the Internet. That is why he argues that this crisis must be used to prepare for the next catastrophe, which could strike anywhere. "We don't know precisely what disasters will occur, but we know the kinds of challenges we will face, and we know the kinds of relationships we need to overcome them, whether it's a disaster affecting infrastructure, or related to cyber security or nuclear conflict," Schlegelmilch said in an interview with Efe on the internet.

This expert has just published the book "Rethinking Readiness. A Brief Guide to Twenty-First-Century Megadisasters" (Rethinking Readiness. A Brief Guide to Twenty-First-Century Megadisasters" where he reviews what he considers to be the five greatest threats facing the world: biological diseases and bio-terrorism, the climate crisis, the collapse of infrastructure, cyber-attacks and nuclear weapons.

A book that was already ready in 2019, but whose publication was delayed until this July due to the irruption of the pandemic, with the aim of including an introduction dedicated to the COVID-19. "I think this is really a very important time for everyone to step back and look first at the things that have worked, even though it's hard to identify them with so many things going wrong," says Schlegelmich, who works at the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

The expert identifies the community, which suffers and copes with disasters on the ground, as one of the essential elements to be invested in to strengthen resilience. "The world will continue to turn, whether or not we have enough information to be confident in our decisions or not. So I would say that we really need to engage with the community and invest in those relationships with communities, and make sure that there are relationships that empower communities," says the book's author.

For him, one of the mistakes that has traditionally been made is to impose solutions on these communities from the state or from large bodies. "Raising community voices and building on and supporting that capacity that exists within the community will be better than replacing it from outside. I think it's the best chance we have for that recovery to be an opportunity to build resilience, rather than impose solutions and then jump to the next disaster," he adds.

That is why he recommends that, as individuals, beyond preparing for any eventuality by buying the material we may need in the face of an emergency, we should invest in our relationship with the neighborhood and the community because in the event of a disaster the help provided by neighbors can be key to survival and recovery.

But in addition to these horizontal connections, Schlegelmich urges more involvement in politics and going to the polls because, he says, "right now the [electoral] incentive for political representatives is to invest a lot of money in recovery, not in preparedness, and we really need to change that, we really need elected politicians to be accountable for preparedness".

On the current pandemic in the United States, where contagion continues to increase in most states, Schlegelmich charged against President Donald Trump's administration, which he called "disastrous. "Nationally, especially within the United States, it has been a disaster, it has been politicized, divisions between different areas of life have been used to separate people for political reasons," he said.

This "is really hampering the ability (to act)," says the expert, who also praises the performance of some states, especially those in the northeast - New York, Connecticut, Vermont, Massachusetts and New Jersey - which have come together to act in a coordinated way.

Schlegelmich, who confesses that last weekend he went out with his family for the first time to eat on an open-air terrace and felt safe putting his mask on every time the waitress came to serve them at the table, also stresses the importance of flexibility in dealing with the uncertainty associated with disasters. "It's a matter of taking advantage of complexity and uncertainty, and instead of trying to force certainty and force clean and clear answers, we must create new systems and new approaches that have more multidisciplinary teams and build systems that are more focused on creating different options that can be used to adopt uncertainty instead of trying to expel it from our thinking," he says.

In this sense, he maintains that "there are mechanisms to manage uncertainty" and he gives the example of the private sector of technology companies "that do not know the habits of consumers when they want to develop something that attracts them". There is also the military, assuring that the Army has protocols to decide "when a decision must be made, even if it is not known what decision will be made, because it will depend on all those different factors".

Another issue he highlights is the need to break with the short-term vision in which we live, because governments are focused on elections, companies in their production cycles and their quarterly announcements of results and citizens with making ends meet and paying bills. This way of thinking, which must be broken with education according to the author, makes it difficult to work on all aspects to prepare for a flood or other disaster that may occur in 30 years' time.

That is why, says Schlegelmich, scientific research into the preparation and treatment of mega-disasters needs to be developed and funded. For the expert, disaster science is characterized by the "fusion of many different fields of study" and requires a great diversity of perspectives, both scientific and from the communities involved. This research, he argues, must be supported not only by public entities or universities, but also by businesses, since, as has been seen in this and other mega-disasters, preparedness for the hazard will affect different economic sectors to varying degrees.

"Just as businesses benefit from the safety provided by governments or from road and communications infrastructure, they will also benefit from resilience," he says. To this end, he cites as an example Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico in 2017 and where, although many pharmaceutical factories were not seriously affected, they had to stop production because there were power cuts and roads were destroyed. "The more resilient a community is, the more resilient the business" that works there, he concludes.

After this pandemic, Schlegelmich believes that the world must be prepared not for the next mega-disaster, but for the next ones that could come because economies, increasingly pressured by disasters, do not invest what is necessary in basic infrastructure and because tensions between nuclear powers are increasing. The expert also adds, among other things, a possible flu pandemic, the climate crisis and the increasingly common computer attacks by individuals and states, such as Russia's attempts to influence the 2016 US presidential elections.

However, he stresses that he feels optimistic and comments, amidst jokes, that his aim is not to frighten everyone. "These problems may seem overwhelming, but they are not impossible [to solve]. They are really very hard and complex, but it is also true that we have more connections available, that the knowledge available is greater than at any other time (...) and that we have the necessary tools," he says. Finally, he says, the only thing that needs to be done is to get to work on "creating a more resilient future for our children and our children's children.