| Emergency Telecommunications and Mitigation-Oriented Policymaking |
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| Written by Gordon Gow | |
| Monday, 17 January 2005 | |
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Dowload as Word document | Download as PDF As one might expect for a field that evolved in close conjunction with national security and civil defence planning, ‘emergency telecommunications’ continues to embody many of the features of the military models that set the original tone for policy and program design in the field of emergency management. In most countries around the world, much of the effort in emergency telecommunications is therefore confined to addressing needs that arise in conjunction with preparedness, response, and recovery operations. In other words, the field is typically concerned with the envelope of actions directly related to critical incidents or disasters. This means that the field of practice has been concerned primarily with hardening vital facilities, restoring essential services and maintaining essential communication channels during an emergency, rather than with the long-term management of critical infrastructures in society. In short, the history of emergency telecommunications has been reactive rather than proactive. The recent and largely needless tragedy around the Indian Ocean basin highlights this legacy. As one might expect for a field that evolved in close conjunction with national security and civil defence planning, ‘emergency telecommunications’ continues to embody many of the features of the military models that set the original tone for policy and program design in the field of emergency management. In most countries around the world, much of the effort in emergency telecommunications is therefore confined to addressing needs that arise in conjunction with preparedness, response, and recovery operations. In other words, the field is typically concerned with the envelope of actions directly related to critical incidents or disasters. This means that the field of practice has been concerned primarily with hardening vital facilities, restoring essential services and maintaining essential communication channels during an emergency, rather than with the long-term management of critical infrastructures in society. In short, the history of emergency telecommunications has been reactive rather than proactive. The recent and largely needless tragedy around the Indian Ocean basin highlights this legacy. This critique is not intended to diminish the importance of current programs and planning measures. During a disaster, telecommunications networks can support many important functions ranging from alerting local populations, to coordinating emergency response activities among government and non-government agencies, to enabling the continuity of government functions and business transactions. The GETS (Government Emergency Telecommunications System) program in the United States represents one example of an initiative intended to support this traditional emergency telecommunications role. GETS is an emergency telephone service offered by the National Communications System (NCS), within the Department of Homeland Security, and is designed to provide all levels of government, industry, and non-governmental organizations with emergency access and priority processing in both the local and long distance segments of the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Within the wider field of current practice it is also important to recognize something called ‘public safety’ telecommunications, which generally refers to small scale incidents where individuals use a telephone to contact emergency services for help. Today this deceptively simple function is becoming complicated by recent developments such as mobile phones and VoIP, but its essential design remains the same and is based on a single, widely known emergency number (911 or 112) available in most major urban centres. While recognizing that there are important and essential distinctions in both policy and practice between localized incidents - such as a 911 call - and widespread disasters, the generic term ‘emergency telecommunications’ is sometimes used to refer to both kinds of programs. For instance, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) under its EMTEL program takes a unified, comprehensive approach to the field as characterized by its scope of activities:
Across this broad range of activities, it is perhaps surprising to discover that policy research has largely been confined to the domain of disaster planning and response, rather than with the more difficult challenge of disaster mitigation. Disaster mitigation gained ascendancy as a concept with the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR) during the 1990s. Much of the IDNDR’s work focussed on the developing regions of the world in order to promote the development of disaster mitigation programs in those countries most prone to suffer socially and economically from the impact of natural hazards. The IDNDR also served to push mitigation on to the agenda in advanced industrial nations, where rapidly rising costs of disaster recovery are cause for alarm among both private and public institutions. For instance, the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been promoting mitigation since the mid-1990s as a measure to reduce the costs to government in assisting citizens to recover from losses incurred as a result of natural disasters (Federal Emergency Management Agency, 1996). In 2003, the Australian government launched its National Disaster Mitigation Programme, noting that,
The fundamental principle common to all disaster mitigation strategies is an emphasis on the necessity of public policy measures to extend beyond a response orientation and to engage proactively with the underlying causes that lead to the formation of risk and vulnerability in society in the first place. Moreover, the principle of mitigation introduces an important idea for policymakers; namely, that disaster reduction efforts might work in a coordinated way to support other social policy objectives, thereby expanding significantly the range of stakeholders who could invest in or otherwise contribute to such programs. In order to understand a fundamental difference between mitigation and response-oriented strategies it is helpful to compare and assess the kinds of emergency telecommunications activities that involve public institutions:
We can expand this list if we include three additional categories that involve private and non-governmental institutions:
In what follows, I will sketch some of the main features of these domains as well as strengths and weaknesses with respect to their suitability for mitigation-oriented policy research and programs, suggesting that a new approach is needed today. |
New resource: Emergency Telecommunications and Mitigation-Oriented Policymaking - This article is based on an excerpt from the forthcoming book Policymaking for Critical Infrastructure, by Gordon A. Gow of the London School of Economics and Political Science (Ashgate. ISBN: 0 7546 4345 X). It was adapted by the author for the World Dialogue on Regulation.