This content was originally published on The Resilience Shift website. The Resilience Shift, a 5-year programme supported by Lloyd’s Register Foundation and hosted by Arup, transitioned at the end of 2021 to become Resilience Rising. You can read more about The Resilience Shift’s journey and the transition to Resilience Rising here.
Critical infrastructure sectors and services are interdependent on electricity supply to protect, connect and provide for individuals and societies. How will we cope in a “black sky’ catastrophe?
The Resilience Shift is partnering with the Electric Infrastructure Security Council (EIS Council) to expand the “Earth Ex‘ simulation exercises. This is a proven approach to understanding interdependencies in practice through a “black sky hazard’ scenario.
The goal is to learn how better to build multi-sector resilience, implementing Earth Ex sector exercises to allow critical infrastructure players to improve their planning to black sky events by adopting systems thinking, cross-sector approaches.
The Resilience Shift is hosting two Earth Ex events in the United Kingdom initially, in London, 28 February and Glasgow, 4 March 2019, in partnership with the EIS Council.
These will be a locally facilitated, “come as you are” exercise, helping corporate and government teams and community leaders to build interconnected resilience planning and to iteratively formulate materials for a coordinated, multi-sector resilience planning approach.
The EIS Council facilitates national and international collaboration and planning to protect our societies’ critical utilities against uniquely severe black sky hazards. It aims to enable utilities and their partners to develop and implement cost effective, consensus-based protection measures by hosting frameworks for sustained coordination, planning and best practice development.
It has developed an expanding multi-sector, systems engineering-framed resilience planning development effort specifically developed to discover and help resolve complex, interdependent disaster scenarios. This planning effort grew rapidly in recent years through the development and use of Earth Ex, a family of compelling, media-enhanced exercises.
The Resilience Shift expects that direct beneficiaries from this work will include government agencies that have a key role in both UK and multinational advance-planning and real time coordination, as well as a role in development of critical all-hazard tools.
It will also benefit corporations, including those directly providing critical infrastructure services, and those whose supplies and services are essential to the functionality of infrastructure providers.
The global Earth Ex exercise, for organisations or individuals, takes place this year on 21 August 2019 and is open to all. Register here.
For more on the Resilience Shift project on the electricity sector and interdependencies see our project page.
