World risk poll 2021

The World Risk Poll represents an ideal tool to explore people’s experiences and perceptions of risk and to begin understanding resilience at a granular level, especially in countries where such data is not routinely collected or available. Ensuring the safety of critical infrastructure will continue to be a core goal of the Foundation and assessing resilience – both of infrastructure and of people and communities more broadly – will be a major element of our upcoming 2023 and 2025 World Risk Polls. A key focus of the review was on building the resilience of infrastructure sectors such as electricity, water, transportation, telecommunications, healthcare, and food which are critical to preserving life and supporting a rapid return to normality. Improving the resilience of critical infrastructure is important to improving public confidence in government disaster preparedness, and should be done as a critical part of broader disaster risk reduction strategies.

The publication finds the following: 

• All actors involved in the planning and delivery of critical infrastructure services, whether local or national government or private sector suppliers, must work together as closely and cohesively as possible to improve resilience and minimize supply disruption during disasters. 
• All actors must foster individual, household and community level resilience, encouraging the uptake of household disaster planning in communities and ensuring people know what to do if access to critical infrastructure services is disrupted. 
• All actors must ensure that both efforts to improve infrastructure resilience, and what to do if it does fail, are clearly communicated to the public in communities at risk.