COVID-19, Black Swan events and the future of disaster risk management in India

This paper is a slightly modified version of the lecture recently delivered by the author. It addresses a question, based on India's experience, if the current practice of disaster management needs to be revisited in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that has had an unprecedented impact. The pandemic is being widely described as a Black Swan event, an event that has outsized impact, that is harder to predict and even harder to compute it probabilities. A contrary view is that, in many ways, it is an entirely expected event, given that all the drivers of risk were there in plain sight. In whichever manner we characterise this event, disaster risk management systems as well as public health systems in India and across the world have been challenged and stretched to the limit. While it is too early to draw final conclusions, some early lessons could be drawn. A preliminary analysis suggests five key lessons: 1) Need for more dynamic risk assessment tools, 2) No substitute for community action, 3) Risk is global, resilience is local, 4) From managing risk we need to focus on managing uncertainty, and 5) From managing risk we need to focus on building resilience. There is a need to build our robustness and resilience to risks that may not be known or may not be fully understood yet. Some authors have introduced the concept of "Antifragile: things that gain from disorder." This paper highlights five pillars of our efforts in this direction: 1) A further strengthened Disaster Risk Management system, particularly at the local level, 2) Resilient Infrastructure, 3) Resilient Financial System with equitable access, 4) Social protection, and 5) Sustainable Natural Resource Management.