Emergency and Resilience Practitioners in Scotland in 2023: Understanding and meeting the challenges ahead

Tuesday 03rd October 2023

Emergency planning, resilience, business continuity and risk reduction are the activities we plan, practice and train for in the hope they will never be needed.  They mitigate the worst when it happens and bring assurance and stability when it does not.  However, the threats presented to normal order are magnified by local, national and international events which can bring instability to our own front door.  The consequences of globally linked economies in bad times.  The potential public health effects of diseases on intimately linked societies.  Open and interwoven digital worlds across national borders.  A destabilised international order.  Increasingly turbulent effects of climate change.  The impact of economic downturn on lower public investment and safety and quality outcomes.  Then there are the kinds of accidents and disasters which can occur in good or bad times.  So how do we plan for the unexpected, ensure that we learn from every opportunity, collaborate to maximise best practice and keep our emergency planning and resilience practitioners, and our responders at every tier, well-resourced and able to prevent and react?

Emergency planning in Scotland has come a long way in the last 25 years.  From a period in which some may have thought that civil contingencies and emergency planning were, to some extent, becoming a Cinderella service after the end of the Cold War, we are now in a completely different world.  It is unimaginable that trying to minimise emergencies and disasters through prevention and good practice, maintaining resilience in the face of major and minor incidents and responding quickly and effectively to such occurrences would be anything other than a core activity for all public sector agencies and most in the private and third sectors too.

Since the turn of the millennium, civil contingencies preparadeness has heightened and continued to grow in importance.  The need to plan for the Y2K 'millennium bug' in 2000 and the attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001 were perhaps the two events which initially triggered a new awareness of the critical importance of resilience and emergency planning.  Since then, a succession of terrorist incidents, natural disasters, major accidents, extreme weather climate-related events and, most recently, COVID pandemic have seen our systems, responses and resilience repeatedly needed and tested.

So, what lies ahead for our resilience and emergency planning community and its professionals, practitioners and structures?  What are the challenges they may need to respond to and how can they harness best practice and collaboration to anticipate and meet the tests in coming months and years?  What resources and structures, awareness and systems, and anticipation of a constantly changing world and its threats will they need to combine?

This conference examines the responsibility ahead for Scotland's resilience and emergency planning community in meeting current and future demands in an uncertain environment where finance, risk, global instability and climate change combine to present constantly evolving challenges.  Against this backdrop the conference will focus on three broad themes:

• Where have we come from and where are we heading?
• Key themes and practitioners
• Case studies and staying up to date

Topics to be discussed

• Reflections on recent emergency planning history and resilience today
• What's coming next - planning for knowing the unknowable
• Public safety and public bodies
• Cyber vigilance and preparedness
• Policing, multi-agency co-operation and resilience
• Climate change, extreme weather and risk - understanding what we are facing
• Learning from pandemic and preparing for the future
• From resilience to emergency alert - containing risk

Speakers

Professor Nigel Arnell

Professor of Climate System Science, Department of Meteorology

University of Reading