EARTH EX® – London and Glasgow. Building resilience for global scale complex catastrophes

Region

Europe

Published: May 2019

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.

Our infrastructure is interconnected and interdependent. A major incident in one location can cascade rapidly and have an impact on critical infrastructure systems elsewhere, affecting their ability to function, to connect communities, provide essential services, or to protect society.

A ‘black sky hazard’ is defined by the EIS Council as ‘a catastrophic event that severely disrupts the normal functioning of our critical infrastructures in multiple regions for long durations’.

How well prepared are we for such an event? The impacts of a major loss of electricity supply would rapidly expand into water, communications, food supply, finance, and beyond.

The Resilience Shift is pleased to have partnered with the pioneers at the Electric Infrastructure Security Council (EIS Council) to explore how a simulated catastrophic scenario encourages multi-sector stakeholders to think about their role within the whole system and challenge their response and recovery plans.

The EARTH EX exercises presented in this report, pioneered by the EIS Council, are an important step towards multi-sector resilience planning.

The Resilience Shift team

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