Emergency Planners Are Having a Moment

Lucy Easthope is a professional emergency planner. She helps governments and businesses prepare for the worst. In the age of the permacrisis, it’s a growing profession. “We’re having a little bit of a—I don’t know if you can call it a renaissance—maybe just a ‘naissance,’” says Easthope, a professor in practice of risk and hazard at the University of Durham. Being ready, Easthope believes, begins with being willing to talk about the worst-case scenario.

“It doesn’t need to be frightening. Actually, it’s great to say: OK, when something happens, I’m ready.” Right now, that something feels like it could be anything: another pandemic, another international conflict, another breakdown of global trade.

Ahead of speaking at WIRED Health in London on March 19, Easthope sat down with WIRED to talk about how governments and individuals can get better at preparing for emergencies. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The world is changing. We’re seeing more extreme weather, lots of humanitarian issues, more conflict. What’s on an emergency planner’s mind in 2024?

One of the big things the world talks about is climate change. But as disaster planners, for us, it’s more lots and lots of sequential smaller events caused by changing meteorology. So we plan for more flooding or more heat waves. It’s a fairly constant cycle of events.

The UK government separates these things into hazards and threats: things that come from nature versus things like terrorism. Then in the middle you’ve got no-notice accidents [like an air crash]. One of the challenges is just how broad that list gets.

And there are new things on the horizon. One thing that often raises eyebrows is the idea that something like a pandemic is very likely. A pandemic like Covid was a very predicted risk. Very few things take us by surprise.

And a constant marinade for our work is chronic conditions—so things like social care collapsing, or very poor financial situations, austerity—and also, obviously, conflict. Things going on that affect your ability to respond.

How well does your country—the UK—respond to emergencies?

We planners have had a hard time. Planning’s very hard to get traction for unless the thing’s right on your doorstep and happening. And that “marinade” affects what goes on.

We’re actually quite far behind other nations in terms of citizen preparedness. There’s a learned helplessness often in the UK. We don’t have the cultures that you see in places like America or Australia and New Zealand.

The other thing we suffer from in the UK is a failure of imagination. People look out the window, they don’t necessarily see a river, so they don’t think they’re at risk of flooding. That’s a real challenge.

What makes the US or Australia better?

There’s much more of a culture of education. Emergency planning doesn’t tend to survive short-term politics. But where there are fairly obvious geographical, meteorological, and seismic threats, it’s seen as good planning by the state to be ready—to prepare for things like tsunamis and earthquakes in New Zealand, for example. It’s not seen as the state letting on that they have a problem.

These places have, for example, “72 schemes,” which is, if you’re in your home post-weather-event or something and no help comes for 72 hours, what would you have ready? What would you do? So, generators, torches.