UK Resilience 2008: Contributions to Resilience

About the event:

Our modern ‘just-in-time’, deeply interdependent society is becoming more inherently susceptible to disruption and crisis. This growing susceptibility is being compounded by the context of an ever more turbulent world. The barriers to resilience are increasing, and the challenge is such that it cannot be met by individuals, national regions, industry sectors or even nation states, when working alone.

The advent of the UK’s civil contingencies regime represented the realisation that central, regional and local tiers of government could not respond to emergencies and crisis effectively in isolation or without reference to certain key stakeholders from other sectors. However, as the potential magnitude of threats and hazards continues to unfold, so the task of ensuring our resilience against them becomes greater in scale and complexity.

Resilience in the face of climate change and increasingly frequent episodes of extreme weather, pandemics, energy insecurity, dwindling resources and terrorism will require an unprecedented coalition of actors. Ranging in depth from individual citizens to international institutions, and spanning fully the public, private and third sectors in breadth, it is these various contributions to resilience which will provide the focus for this two day RUSI conference.

Drawing upon leading thinkers and the most senior policy makers and planners from across all sectors of the UK and beyond, this event will be of critical value to anybody with an interest in understanding what the future resilience of the UK will require, and what their or their organisation’s contributions to resilience will entail.

Confirmed Speakers Include:

• Bruce Mann, Director, Civil Contingencies Secretariat, Cabinet Office
• Michael Brown, Former Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
• Chris West, Director of UK Climate Impacts Programme, Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University Centre for the Environment
• David Steven, Director, Riverpath Associates
• Professor John Oxford, Professor of Virology, Centre for Infectious Disease, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry
• Sir David Omand GCB, Vice President, RUSI
• Professor Jim Norton, Commissioner, IPPR Commission on National Security in the 21st Century
• David Burrill OBE, Director, Burrill Green
• Professor Denis Smith, Professor of Management, University of Glasgow
• Nick Best, Deputy Regional Director, Regional Resilience, Government Office for Yorkshire and the Humber
• George Cook, Chief Executive Officer, Community Resilience UK
• Rod Stafford, Director of Command Development, VectorCommand

The conference programme is currently under development and will be available shortly.

For enquiries regarding contributions and sponsorship of the event please contact Tom Mortimer on tomm@rusi.org or +44(0)20 7747 2627.