Resiliency Manifesto
The Need for Resiliency
Supply chains and logistics in the developed world are highly developed. Goods and services are, by historic standards, inexpensive, reliable and available at the click of button. Things our ancestors had to struggle for simply arrive when we need them. Modern production and distribution systems are extraordinarily good and deliver necessities to consumers who rarely have the need or interest to wonder how and where things are produced.
If you want water, turn a tap. Electricity, gas (if you have it) and water are there all the time and waste is taken away. There's food in the shops and it's generally straightforward to obtain the requirements of a comfortable life without undue stress or effort.
However - as recent events have shown - those systems work broadly as designed when there isn't unusual stress, but do much worse when stress gets applied. In 2021/2, Covid, a shortage of delivery drivers and occasional extreme weather events have led to
- supermarkets unable at times to fill shelves
- filling stations without enough fuel (due exceptional demand exceeding delivery capability)
- some homes being without electricity for as much as 9 days following storm damage.
There's a long-standing tradition of doomsayers and pessimists siezing on such symptoms and extrapolating the imminent collapse of society. This manifesto does not address or expect collapse. However we believe that it's reasonable for a thinking person to stop, take stock, and wonder what realistic events, even if low in probability, would have a high enough impact to justify looking at how our current systems would behave under stress. We should consider what would be needed to add resilience to them, ourselves and our communities before (and if or when) they start to let us down.
The 2020-2022 Covid pandemic has been disruptive to economic activity and taken some businesses to the brink yet has been mild: the mortality rate has been mercifully low at roughly 0.1%. Those, who for years have been concerned about the emergence of pandemic disease, consider that we've been fortunate, since it's widely assumed that another pandemic with even a mortality rate of 'only' one or two percent would be likely to have a drastic effect on supply chains as people fall ill, tend to loved ones or simply refuse to leave their homes out of prudence. In January of 2022, staff shortages of 10% to 20% due to infection by the mild Omicron Covid variant caused serious issues in many sectors simply due to people self-isolating.
Fragility of Supply
Electricity supplies in the UK have been highly reliable for decades, but warning voices can be heard pointing out a high level of reliance on gas at time when ageing nuclear plants are scheduled to close without replacement and alternatives like wind and solar cannot maintain a base load - 'keeping the lights on'. The UK is increasingly dependent on gas from overseas as our own fields are becoming depleted, creating vulnerability to market price spikes and the whims of other regimes, friendly or not. The UK's weather is reasonably benign, the last hurricane-force winds having been recorded from storm Ciara in 2020 and Arwen in 2021, each fortunately sparing the cables which support the backbone of the electricity grid, but it's not unreasonable to ask, in a time of increasing climate instability, how long that may last. Storm damage will not necessarily affect only the periphery of the electricity grid: flooding in Lancaster in 2015 blacked-out large parts of the city, taking days to fix.
In 2021 car manufacturing moved to short-time working due to a global shortage of computer chips, the world having but a handful of factories capable of making such advanced technology, highlighting how little fallback is available to just-in-time supply chains of strategic components.
Food prices around the world are forecast to rise steeply in 2022/3 due to the knock-on effects of natural gas prices, a key feedstock in fertilizer manufacturing. The same thing led to panic measures having to be taken in the livestock industry as reduced fertilizer manufacture caused a shortage of (of all things) carbon dioxide. High food prices are, in many places, strongly linked to civil unrest and potential civil war (see below).
Covid is only one of other crises that can impact supply chains. The Evergreen container ship disrupted shipping through the Suez canal by accident. The political threat of Russia reducing the flow of gas to Europe, strikes and civil unrest in key locations, disease coupled with lockdowns and possibly another a war in the Middle East are all manifest risks.
Many businesses are now realising that the cost of disrupted supply chains is greater than the saving of just-in-time stocking, and are transitioning to "Just-in Case" stocking, on-shoring and shortening supply chains - indeed this has caused notable shortages as re-stocking inflates demand.
Locally, modern commmerce and supply chains are critically dependent on a number of things: the obvious are staff and fuel (both of which have struggled this year) but much more fundamentally on a stable electricity supply and also telecommunications. The core telephony and data networks MAY be resilient but are known to be vulnerable to hack attacks, which are of increasing severity and sophistication, led by hostile overseas groups. And of course, if there is no electricity there is no communications. A situation where power or telecommunications have failed is often described as a 'grid down' event and leads to far-reaching consequences.
There are other less obvious critical pieces of infrastructure that we have come to depend on over time. The satellite navigational systems widely used around the world, none of which we control ourselves, and are dependent on administrations for whom we, the UK, are not the most important client. As a study by the Institute of Engineers pointed out that should this system fail, not only would global trade be seriously affected (few ships nowadays carry a sextant or anyone able to use it to navigate) but it has also become a critical component in behind-the-scenes engineering which uses it as the only source of an accurate time signal. You might not have expected that DAB radio would fail to work if the satellite navigation system had a hiccup but that has already happened at least once in practice. And the National Grid's monitoring and fault finding system is now also partly depending on those timing signals and therefore, indirectly, so is the national power supply.
We could go on at length with other illustrative examples, but the point has been made. It's prudent to consider that things might not work as wanted when when we flick a switch, or turn a tap, or try to use the internet. We should take some steps to add fallback and resilience to our lives.
The Goals of The Manifesto
We intend to form a community of interested people who will work on realistic practice and guidance that will help make society a more stable place should previously reliable systems start to creak. Whilst there will be guidance for individuals the goal of the forum is to work more broadly on a community and collegiate level to help public, private and commercial activity to continue as well as possible in times of shortage or stress. To coin a phrase, rather than being like the 'survivalists' who take a pessimistic view of potential societal collapse, we want to work to become 'thrivalists', continuing to thrive in adversity because we prepared appropriately in advance.
There are numerous simple steps that can be taken by individuals and groups to help this process and for that we intend to work on a manual of guidance for individuals, families, communities and enterprises large and small. By becoming resilient ourselves, we intend to reduce the load placed on under-resourced authorities should an actual emergency occur. Instead of being part of the problem, we free ourselves to instead become part of the solution.
There are community-scale objectives that can only be achieved by concerted group effort. One project which we are keen to implement, for example, is a metropolitan scale (i.e. at least city-area in scope) resilient communications infrastructure. Should power or communications fail (a not improbable occurrence), the internet and mobile phones will be dead and consequently many commercial transactions stop. If the power is off or communications have failed, it's no good going out trying to buy candles with a debit card, since nobody will be able to debit your card. As well as heeding the resiliency handbook's advice to have some emergency cash at hand, we need to ensure that transactions involving food and essentials can still take place. The technology now exists to build a solar powered and battery-backed up system which can provide text messaging and commercial transactions (i.e. a payment system) independently of any other infrastructure. A kind of community internet, if you like, but one providing important essential services in a 'grid down' situation. We consider this level of infrastructure to be absolutely essential in a developed society and its development and roll-out is an important goal of the group.
As a further illustration, by working as a group we can do things that individuals cannot. We can consider, where appropriate, building up stocks of essentials and providing a rational scheme of distributing it according to need rather than by accident. We can ensure that we have a suitable register of skills and resources (e.g. fuels, food, medical supplies, feedstocks, tools, equipment) so we know what can be provided. We will have a community of motivated and like-minded people we can draw upon in time of need rather than trying to create it when the need is already upon us. We can coordinate the use of those skills and capabilities if we have planned in advance and we will have the communications system in place to help us direct it. Having a communications and planning structure ahead of time beats trying to create one when time itself is scarce.
Expecting local government or other authorities to do this is a non-starter. If anything other than the lowest-stress event happens, they will be hopelessly overstretched and under-resourced. We can help to make it better for them and in doing so, help strengthen community roots and ties.