For several years, the Electric Infrastructure Security Council (EIS Council) has delivered the global resilience exercise, ‘EARTH EX’, that simulates cascading failure scenarios involving a number of factors. Simulation exercises are a proven approach to understanding inter-dependencies in practice, and the EIS was keen to build awareness of a implications of a ‘black sky hazard’ scenario. It also shared the consequent learning from participants about how best to respond and prepare to such uncertainties.

Having participated in the exercises in 2018 and 2020, The Resilience Shift partnered in 2019 with the EIS Council to test the use of the scenario methodology at workshops in London and Glasgow, United Kingdom, to see the value of improving understanding of interdependencies and multi-stakeholder response to crisis, and how this can inform better preparedness for such events, and promote critical infrastructure resilience.

The report from these workshops is available here.

In 2019, EARTH EX III  was open to play between August and October and was the largest resilience exercise ever with over 11,000 individuals and nearly 2,000 organisations participating from 38 sectors and 42 nations.

Its conclusions include that the impact of a major loss of electricity supply would rapidly expand into water, communications, food supply, finance and beyond. It is simply not credible to assume that because any one organisation was well prepared that it could continue to function when all services around were rendered inoperable.

The six resilience-focused lessons learned from EARTH EX are around:
• Planning and plan integration.
• Cross-sector co-ordination with tools and techniques.
• Communications capabilities.
• Workforce preparation.
• Co-ordination.
• Resource management.

The report from that exercise is available here.

Early findings were shared at a joint event prior to publication, with Resilience First and the EIS Council, in December 2019.

Direct beneficiaries from this work are government agencies that have a key role in both UK and multinational advance planning and real time coordination, as well as a role in development of critical all-hazard tools. This is also of value for corporations in all sectors, including those directly providing critical infrastructure services, and those whose supplies and services are essential to the functionality of infrastructure providers.