Editorial | New class of disasters

In an echo of the early Cold War days when people in the West stocked home bunkers in case of nuclear war, Britain this week advised its citizens to store at least three days of food, water and cash in the event of emergencies.

In this, the UK has joined a raft of European countries, as well as the United States, in telling people to be prepared for situations where normal services either don’t work for short periods or face near total collapse.

Said the British defence secretary, Wes Streeting, of the advisory, “It’s really important that we ask households and businesses, are they prepared? Are they ready? Do they know how they would respond in the event of everyday challenges that might manifest themselves?”

The questions raised by Mr Streeting and other European policymakers have been amplified by three developments.

While the immediate fear is not of nuclear war, Europe claims that Moscow is waging an undeclared, so-called hybrid war against NATO and NATO-aligned countries in an effort to weaken their support for Ukraine. So, the argument goes, Russia could wage cyber-attacks that disrupt everything, from domestic commerce and banking services to electricity grids, all of which depend on Internet connectivity for their efficient operation.

However, it doesn’t require State adversaries or other malign actors for digitally linked systems to go awry globally. In recent days, for example, owners of Internet sites shut them down and scrambled to fix security flaws that have existed for decades in PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), the programming language that powers much of the Internet. The vulnerabilities made networks more susceptible to hacking.

DECTECTED

Indeed, the vulnerabilities of PHP were detected by researchers with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Ironically, AI bots have in the past independently hacked other people’s systems, causing another debate about the control, safety and security of emerging super-intelligent AI systems.

Finally, global warming and climate change have increasingly resulted in unpredictable weather events and natural disasters across the continent. In recent years Europe has faced unprecedented hot spells and heatwaves that have caused the deaths of thousands of people.

Additionally, the continent has also had to contend with unaccustomed storms and floods, for which its populations were largely unprepared.

The question for Jamaica, and perhaps other countries in the Caribbean, is whether they ought to adopt the kind of catastrophe mobilisation and preparation now being initiated in the UK, but which has long been on the agenda of other countries, such as France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

Caribbean countries have long histories of preparing for hurricanes, which usually means panic-buying of non-perishable food, water and lighting devices in periods when meteorologists warn that a potentially dangerous storm is on their path. To be fair, the region’s disaster preparedness and emergency management services periodically advise citizens that they should have emergency stocks in place well ahead of the threat of a disaster. That messaging, though, is, in this newspaper’s view, not as sustained or robust as it should be.

HYBRID WARFARE

Yet, like in Europe and elsewhere, the threats of societal disruption in Jamaica and the Caribbean are not only from natural disasters, even if the region may not share the same concern for asymmetrical or hybrid warfare by State actors.

Similar to other modern electricity grids, Jamaica’s operates with the support of digital control and data systems, as well as Internet-facilitated telemetry for information collection and transmission. Many electricity consumers have smart meters that rely on the Internet.

The upshot: the grid is susceptible to digital cascading. If software malfunctions, whether hit by ransomware and malware, or just a severe bug, a cascading power outage event could occur.

It is not clear whether recent cascading power cuts in Jamaica were from such an event. What is known, however, is that the knock-on effect from such an event could be severe. Water treatment facilities could go dead for a lack of power, digital fuel pumps could shut down, cell towers could go offline and point-of-sale machines rendered ineffective. And more.

This is a new class of catastrophe for which disaster preparedness officials have to plan and citizens be prepared for. There was no noise in Jamaica about the PHP crisis that swirled globally, with the concern that accompanied the start of the new millennium, Y2K, when there was widespread fear of an Internet failure. However, it is hard to believe that Jamaica was immune from the issue that concentrated minds elsewhere.

The bottom line: there must be a broadening of the conversation in Jamaica on what counts as disaster and how it is prepared for.