What Is a "HILF" and Why Do They Need to Be Taken Seriously?

Is it just me, or do there seem to have been a lot of disasters happening in recent years? I mean, apart from the pandemic. Now there’s all this talk of UFOs sightings, having rapidly from a joke to a national security concern in Washington.

What’s going on?

How can we prepare for the impact of seemingly fantastical low-probability occurrences, but with the potential of explosive impact should they come true - the so-called Black Swan type events?

Uncertainty means big stakes that need to be worked through

Source: fotografierende/Pexels

The infrastructure, economy, environment, and culture of any country depends on a Governments’ ability to protect them from the impact of natural or unnatural events resulting in disaster or crisis.

Rather than relatively everyday threats such as severe weather events, focus is now turning towards high impact, low frequency events, or “HILFs”.

These events are definitively irregular, unpredictable, and cause high disruption when they occur. We only have to look at our current experience of the coronavirus pandemic to understand how HILFs can affect societies. We may also reflect on how our understanding of low frequency might change because of narrow escapes from full scale pandemics in recent decades (e.g. H1N1, SARS and MERS).

When dealing with high-impact, low probability events, governments need to invest in pre-emptive measures to promote resilience and prepare for extreme events. These can include climate change, solar flares, biological accidents or attacks, and technological malfeasance, such as cyber-attacks on the US fuel pipeline, and a recent Government health system attack here in New Zealand.

Uncertain but inevitable

The recent report from The University of Auckland’s Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures, “Uncertain But Inevitable: The Expert-Policy-Political Nexus and High-Impact Risks”, argues that there is a disconnect between scientific and policy awareness of these issues, and actual policy and investment actions designed to address these threats.

One of the big issues is whether the HILF event is likely to take place within a political term, or perceivable future for which we can hold any Government accountable. When any pre-emptive action is seen to be potentially expensive, it can be “kicked down the road”, and delayed or ignored. This is particularly attractive if the framing of the uncertainty of the event means it falls outside of any window of time for which the Government of the day has a mandate to decide.

The report argues that much of this may not be a conscious decision to avoid deciding, however appealingly Machiavellian this may appear to be. Rather, it may be the effect of the super-conjunction of cognitive biases, variable risk perceptions of different actors in the risk management system, the nature of political and policy decision-making.
The report continues to contrast the diffuse and un-assignable accountabilities in the multiple layers of local, regional and national Government systems, with risk management accountabilities in the private sector, which are arguably clearer. The age of misinformation in which we currently live just makes this even more complex that it otherwise would be - which is complicated enough as it is.

Don't just identify risks: prepare

The answer, according to this report is not just to identify the risks: too often, the work stops here. Many countries have published a national risk register that outlines their countries’ major risks. And although this can help in forming decisions and actions, it is not enough.

Preparing for these risks systematically, transparently, and cooperatively across levels of Government at all levels is urgent because of the level of impact these HILF events may have. But in order to make this investment, there needs to be a level of communication of the understanding of the potential costs and benefits of such preparations with the public and the private sector to increase awareness and get critical buy-in.

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Ignoring the potential of HILF events on modern intertwined societies is not a viable option because this can only lead to catastrophic outcomes one day. But this also needs to be balanced against the fact that risk management is not an exact science: we can’t know everything about an identified risk.

Fact-based conversations about what we do and don’t know about a particular risk are really tough today - especially when billions of dollars and millions of lives may depend on getting this right. But we also need to acknowledge that this is bigger than a game of getting out of Government before a disaster happens on your watch, and leaving the tough decisions for the next administration.

We all have skin in the game. It’s wiser to act like it.