BUSINESS CONTINUITY – ONE OF THE ESSENTIAL DRIVERS IN CITY RESILIENCE

Some events have completely changed our perception of safety and security. Subsequently they have modified the level of prevention one has to adopt in our daily routines, our lifestyle, business, business making, IT/OT security, policies and risk management.

Climate change, rapid and sometimes unmanaged urbanization, industrial development/ agglomeration and full sector digitalisation have been intensifying the magnitude of these crisis and combined they have highlighted the relevance of critical infrastructures and their essential services in case of disruption.

International terrorism, cyber-attacks, major accidents and natural hazards are identified as the most relevant risks to the European security interests. The individual commitment of each and every member state to maintain and strengthen its resilience, reduces the vulnerability of European Union as a whole.

In the Global Risks Report 2016, the World Economic Forum highlighted the impact of cascading effects from natural, man-made or cyber disruption that increasingly impose both economic and human losses. Damages caused by extreme events can be significant and have great impacts on lost revenues, reputational damage, contractual penalties and potential for litigation, leading us to raise our awareness to protect society in a more effective way.

Modern society is highly dependent on the electrical grid, which has been going through a profound and much necessary digital transformation over the past few years, to be able to address the sector challenges. However, this digitalization process highly increases the exposure of network operators to different and hybrid threats, presenting high risks for both business and society that were not present before.

Today, many civil resources and most of all critical infrastructures are owned and operated by the private sector. Within this new security environment, the importance of civil preparedness is crucial, but also challenging. Cooperating is important, but on a larger scale the role of the private sector should be also considered another key element to increasing economic resilience and fostering new opportunities for public-private partnerships and thus improve risk governance at local, regional and national levels. 

The RESCCUE project is focused on natural hazards, mostly related to water, and aims to encourage infrastructure owners and operators, emergency responders, and municipal governments to work together and develop resilience plans based on climate change scenarios. This would improve urban society´s ability to resist, recover easily and quickly from these disruptive events and also for increase resilience of critical and essential services.

For EDP Distribuição (the Portuguese Distributor System Operator) the global community could prevent or mitigate the effects of catastrophic events in our increasingly complex and quickly evolving environment by ensuring a consistent and flexible emergency planning and a prepared response through business continuity implementation.

Nowadays EDP Distribuição, as part of the private sector, develops and maintains a systematic approach for reducing damages from disasters and provide quick restoration of power supply operation that is strongly fostered by his Business Continuity Management System, which is certified by ISO22301:2012 – Societal Security – Business Continuity Management System (BCMS). Business Continuity refers to the capability of an organization to continue delivery of products or services at acceptable predefined levels following a disruptive incident.

However, the relationships between infrastructure networks need to be properly understood to establish reasonable local planning assumptions for civil emergency planning and critical sector operators. BCMS of individual business organization, even prepared and standardized, are not enough to achieve the desired level of business continuity. It is very important to involve all stakeholders and share the common business resources, including supply chain and contractors, in order to efficiency manage critical external resources.

We believe that the RESCCUE approach will allow us to improve the private public cooperation and will also contribute to build an essential framework of urban disaster management system, including the shared knowledge of redundancies and sector’s interdependencies and the possibility of testing the shared resource management of infrastructure owners and operators, emergency responders, and municipal government departments. This challenge will take place in practice through Lisbon, Barcelona and Bristol, the 3 cities project research sites.