By Chloe Demrovsky
Leaders across business and government are reevaluating the status quo and evaluating lessons learned as we emerge from the initial Covid-19 lockdown phase. They will make strategic decisions that will have long-term impacts and outlive the pandemic. What have we learned and what should they consider when reevaluating preparedness overall and supply chain decisions in particular? I recently spoke with Mami Mizutori, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction, and FM Global Executive Vice President and CFO Kevin Ingram, to gain their perspectives on a post Covid-19 world.
“We are living in a multi-hazard world where risk is systemic and disaster impacts are cascading, often in unpredictable ways,” says Mizutori. “Disaster preparedness, action on climate and cyber risk, and pandemic preparedness, all require good governance and political will and commitment to invest in making the world a safer place. If the benefits of investing in disaster prevention were truly realized, we would not be facing the enormous costs now.”
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Mizutori recommends that policymakers must make resilience a priority when trying to encourage a strong business climate. “Just as ‘austerity’ was the buzz-word of the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, ‘resilience’ must become the moving force behind the post-Covid-19 recovery,” she says. “Policymakers need to take multiple and connected risks into consideration when planning for the resilience of their economies. As most national disaster management agencies around the world have learned, the traditional hazard-by-hazard approach does not work anymore.”
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First, be sure to document and act on lessons learned from Covid-19 response. According to Ingram, “companies have short memories.” Highlighting the particular importance of lesson learned “from a supply chain perspective,” Ingram urges companies to “make a concerted effort to mitigate and address those things today.”
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