Play Earth Ex 2022: A Current Crisis Inspired Resilience Exercise for All.

Unfortunatly the Elictric Infrastructure Security Council have withdrawn- at the last moment -EarthEx 2022. I’ll let you know if there are any new developments. You may still find the piece below informative. Thank you for dropping by. David

What would you do if the electricity supply stopped? What if unprecedented weather effectively cut off your town and region for a week, while the extent of the crisis overwhelmed emergency services? A failure of the financial system?  With increasing urgency, these are questions for all of us. One way we can prepare is by playing Earth Ex 22- a simulated crisis. It’s the largest resilience exercise in the world, it’s free, easy-to-use, open to all, and it goes live today (1st Sept).

There is a rapidly escalating gap between the risks society faces, and our preparedness and capacity to respond. The reverberations of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been an accelerant to already intensifying energy, food, climate, supply-chain and financial system risks. This convergence poses a growing threat to the interdependent societal infrastructures that enable electric power, fuel, supply-chains, food, water and sanitation, communications and financial transactions. We cannot be sure what happens this winter or next, but crises and disruptions will be an increasing feature of life. The scale of the potential challenges means that preparing and responding will need to be a whole of society effort.

An exercise is a dynamic immersive environment in which you can play out your response to an evolving crisis. Exercises are often used by governments, contingency planners and emergency services to understand the implications of a crisis scenario, test their plans and response capacity, and improve their preparedness. They can be done by people around a table, or involve thousands getting as near to the crisis experience as possible. They can be secret, though you can get a glimpse of what they do from this leaked story from about exercise Hopkinson, that looked at the implications of a wide-area (25 million people), two-week blackout in England, and here’s a link to a post about a simulation I attended in London back in early 2019 run by the Electric Infrastructure Security Council (EISC) . For the last few months governments and critical infrastructure providers have been busy exercising scenarios associated evolving crisis- rationing, blackouts, and so on. But emerging systemic risks will directly impact the whole of society- how do we all prepare?

The Electric Infrastructure Security Council have developed and run Earth Ex over the last few years. It’s the world’s biggest resilience exercise and there’s a space for everybody. It’s delivered by an on-line web-based tool, using state-of-the-art video and exercise management. Interspersed between breaking news updates and surprises, participants will challenge their situational awareness, resilience, and decision-making as the crisis evolves, and find ways to improve preparedness. Last year the scenario was extreme flooding and fire. The scenario for Earth Ex 22 is inspired by current events, and will include power disruption.

Whether you’re a family, a community coming together without experience, or a city council, major telecommunications company, emergency services, or government agency testing their own contingency plans, there’s something there for you.  Multiple play lanes are tailored to a wide variety of public and private sector organisations and specialists. It’s easy and intuitive to play, and takes about half a day, or more for a larger organisation. There is preparatory support on the EISC website.

For the last few years, I’ve been encouraging (and occasionally facilitating) people and organisations in Ireland to play Earth Ex. People have found the experience very interesting and inspiring, though some found some of the American cultural elements a bit off-putting (we do need localisation of such exercises). This year though is more important than ever, risk and uncertainty are escalating, and we have to rise to meet the challenge...

The best response to the understandable anxieties of our time is preparing together, and exercises are a great way for us to begin that journey.

It can be played any time between now and December. Registration is at:

www.eiscouncil.org/earth-ex/.

If you play Earth Ex, it would be great to get your feedback below.

Please feel free to ask questions- about the exercise, growing systemic risks, preparedness etc..

David Korowicz