Environmental Crises and Disasters
Producing research that matters

Arjen Boin argues that failed responses to environmental risk have revealed the importance of understanding how states and societies manage catastrophic threats and events.

In the summer of 2005, Hurricane Katrina assaulted the coastal areas of three southern US states (Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama) and flooded New Orleans. The disjointed response to this unfolding disaster demonstrated that the systems in place were no match for catastrophic events. In response to the observed shortcomings, Louisiana State University created the Stephenson Disaster Management Institute (SDMI). Through research and education, SDMI aims to improve response systems that can deal with all sorts of catastrophic threats and events.

Such research is needed for two reasons. First, it appears that the nature, scope and effects of crises and disasters will change quite dramatically in the not so distant future. Second, it has become abundantly clear that traditional ways of organizing response systems will be inadequate in the face of these future crises and disasters.

Society under threat: Crises and disasters
The world is replete with crises and disasters. Recent examples of unprecedented adversity include the 9/11 attacks, the Madrid and London bombings, the Asian Tsunami, SARS and Avian Flu, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the California wildfires.

Crises and disasters are risks that come true. They tax our imagination and shake our sense of safety and security. They put societies and their leaders to the test. When a social system comes under threat, its leaders will have to engineer and implement remedial action that protects citizens and their possessions from (further) harm.

For research purposes, it is crucial to draw a sharp distinction between crises and disasters. We define a crisis in terms of a threat to core values or life-sustaining systems, which requires an urgent response under conditions of deep uncertainty. We define a disaster in terms of the outcome or consequences for a society: a disaster is a ‘crisis with a bad ending’. When a crisis is perceived to have really bad consequences, we speak of a catastrophe.

An effective response system separates a crisis from an environmental catastrophe. Sound organization and leadership in the response phase make the difference between a mere threat and a disastrous outcome.

The challenges of crisis management
In times of crisis, the public expects government officials (local, state, and federal) to protect the wellbeing of citizens and livestock, to minimize damage, and to restore a sense of normalcy. Yet, these officials face hard challenges, as they have to act under conditions of deep uncertainty and extreme urgency. Everybody looks at them to ‘do something’, but it is far from clear what that ‘something’ is or whether it is possible to achieve without causing additional harm.

To prevent a crisis from developing into a disaster, political and administrative leaders must carry out a set of complex tasks. They must figure out what is going on, implement command and control procedures, coordinate and deploy resources, make life-or-death decisions, and communicate with government agencies, private companies, NGOs, neighbouring countries and a fear-stricken public. They must manage the response, but they must also worry about restoring legitimacy.

Recent disasters have shown just how hard this set of tasks can be. A crisis creates unique circumstances that demand flexibility, improvization, coordination and speed – not exactly strengths of public bureaucracies operating across multi levels of government. Time pressure, overwhelming emotions, public outcries, political scrutiny, media spotlights and the breakdown of critical infrastructures all conspire against the effectiveness of a government’s response.

Government officials will face even harder challenges as the nature, scope and effects of future crises and disasters will change. Future crises and disasters will be increasingly transboundary, crossing geographic and functional boundaries, jumping from one system to another.

Future threats will create new, unforeseen and unimaginable challenges. The increased complexity of tightly coupled systems will lead to more cascading crises. The development of new technologies, the continuing threat of modern terrorism, and the changing climate will likely bring disasters of an entire new category. Meanwhile, the governmental capacity to deal with these threats is undermined by the inherent difficulties of crisis and disaster management, misguided ideas about the design of response structures, and the political and media context in which these threats must be managed.

Improving practice through research and education: A research agenda
SDMI aims to identify causes of success and failure in disaster response through high-quality research projects. In addition, SDMI will develop and deliver educational means through which the research findings can be disseminated directly to the senior levels of government organizations, NGOs and private enterprise. The following items feature prominently on the SDMI research agenda:

• The information problem. During a crisis or disaster, it is crucially important to get an accurate picture of the evolving situation. In reality, it has proven extremely difficult to effectively organize and analyse information streams. SDMI will identify those factors that enhance a more comprehensive and accurate situational assessment.

• The communication problem. It has proven frustratingly difficult during many disaster response operations to organize lines of communication between all those involved. Communication means often break down (in spite of continuing technological fixes that promise to resolve this problem). Rumours infiltrate and pollute raw data. More importantly, however, is the problem of miscommunication: relaying the wrong information to partners, citizens, media, and other stakeholders. SDMI will extract the lessons from the extensive field of communication studies and probe their validity in the context of crisis and disaster management. SDMI will pay special attention to the role of the media during crises and disasters.

• Designing a highly reliable response system. A response organization is called upon to perform only sporadically. When it does, the network has to meet (preferably surpass) design specifications. It must, in other words, be highly reliable under extreme circumstances that are hard to simulate. Two problems coincide here. One is the problem of high reliability: we do not know what exactly makes a network of organizations reliable. Another is the problem of institutional design: even if we do know the success factors, it is not always clear how to build these into public networks. SDMI will bring together the two research fields that work these questions. The result will be a clearly formulated vision on the design of response networks.

• Nurturing effective leadership. In any disaster response operation, a select number of tasks fall within the exclusive domain of executive leadership. For instance, it is the task of formal leaders to facilitate improvization on the ground, make certain critical decisions and communicate to the stricken population what is going on and what is being done to mediate the damage. In practice, most leaders (many of whom deal with a disaster only once in their lifetime), have no proper conception of their role. SDMI will identify the critical tasks of effective leaders and validate the importance of these tasks by studying a large set of disaster cases.

• Formulate a normative model of disaster management performance. One of the persistent pathologies underlying public, political and academic discourse on crisis and disaster management issues is the absence of a shared model of expectations. What can we reasonably expect from a response system after the sudden onset of a mega disaster? SDMI will explore existing models and map expectations among the public, politicians and the disaster management community. SDMI will formulate a normative model and put it up for public and academic scrutiny.

• Organizing the logistics of disaster response. After a society is struck by massive disruption of critical infrastructures, paralysis and breakdown of routine processes follow quickly. As a result, elementary goods and service are no longer available. This, in turn, makes it hard to repair critical infrastructures. Public bureaucracies find it painfully difficult to shift massive resources effectively and rapidly to a stricken area. Much can be learned from best practices developed in the private sector (notable examples include Wal-Mart and FedEx). SDMI will study large-scale logistical chains in the private sector and translate these lessons to the context of public disaster management.

• Saving animal lives. In modern society, people increasingly attach value to the lives of animals (pets, livetock, and wild animals). The practice of crisis and disaster response has not adapted to this new reality. As a result, response operations are hampered by the unwillingness of citizens to be evacuated without their pets and livestock. The structure and practices of crisis and disaster response operations must be adapted in light of this new reality. SDMI will explore how this can be done.

• Facilitating coordination. A response network typically consists of multiple organizations, many of which have never worked with each other before. Coordination is both crucially important and impossibly hard to achieve on the fly. In fact, it is no exaggeration to label the search for effective coordination the Holy Grail of effective crisis and disaster response. SDMI will explore why some response operations perform well whereas many fall apart.

• The politics of crisis and disaster management. One would expect public authorities to cooperate during a disaster in order to save lives and avert the threat at hand. This often is not the case, however. During crises and disasters, political fault lines do not disappear. The prospect of future gains and losses motivates to a significant degree the actions of actors in the disaster response network. It is crucial to understand the political dynamics of crisis and disaster management, which will help to increase the effectiveness of the response. SDMI will work with experienced practitioners to test and validate theoretically derived insights, and to develop additional insights.

• International cooperation. The mega disasters of the future will increasingly require sustained international cooperation, both in the immediate response phase and in the aftermath. As critical infrastructures become ever more complex and integrated across borders, nation states will not be able to deal with major disturbances by themselves. This poses major challenges, as countries cooperate hesitatingly at best when it comes to international disaster assistance. Much of the international response is facilitated by, and channelled through, NGOs such as the International Red Cross, Doctors without Borders etc. SDMI will work towards the formulation of a new disaster response paradigm that can enhance transatlantic cooperation in the face of transboundary crises and disasters.

• Building societal resilience. Recent disasters have demonstrated the limited capacity of existing response systems. One way to provide increased safety and security is to enhance this capacity (much of our research agenda serves exactly that purpose). A complementary approach is to build resilience into first line responders (which typically include officials, volunteers, and citizens). A resilient society is characterized by the ability to rapidly and innovatively reconfigure available capacities in response to the sudden paralysis of critical infrastructures. SDMI will investigate what leaders can do to enhance resilience and how they can exploit its potential during disasters.

Crises and disasters have always been hard to manage, as they create ‘impossible’ challenges. But leaders and their response operations often fail because they are not properly or fully prepared to deal with these challenges. Political and administrative elites must learn to avoid the pitfalls and pathologies that have hampered many crisis response operations, while implementing the lessons that were learned the hard way. SDMI will help develop insights and strategies that will enhance the effectiveness of crisis and disaster response. In light of the threats that face us, SDMI will cooperate with practitioners and academics to deliver research that can help make the crucial difference between environmental threats and environmental catastrophes.

Arjen Boin Stephenson Disaster Management Institute, Louisiana State University.
For more information, visit www.sdmi.lsu.edu

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