The race to fight off multiple ‘Black Swan’ events |
Britain's fuel and food shortage crises, alongside flooding in Germany and wildfires in places such as the US, have compelled officials to reassess risk preparation strategies, reports the Telegraph. These Black Swan events, or what disaster planners call “long-tail” risks, are not supposed to come all at once, and Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, a fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford says we are all prone to “Black Swan blindness . . . Our brains are not well suited for detecting extreme risks.” Prof Flyvbjerg and other experts say Black Swans are becoming more frequent as the world becomes more complex: “the walls are coming down between natural and human systems, with humans impacting nature at a global scale for the first time in history.” Planners are fooling themselves that they have everything covered in their risk registers, and also commonly make the mistake of “letting down one’s guard because a risk has not materialised for a while,” observes Prof Flyvbjerg.