TED Talks of Benefit to Emergency Mangement Professionals

  • Rachel Kyte
  • Caitria and Morgan O’Neal
  • Lucie Ozanne
  • Limor Aharonson-Daniel
  • Rohini Swaminathan

Emergency response management professionals must have data to effectively enact their priorities—to help communities and individuals in the wake of natural and anthropogenic disasters. But there may be more than bald numbers at work in the wake of even the most isolated events. Disasters impact communities, which are made of individuals. Human responses to disaster have been shown to be prosocial and cooperative, but by ignoring individual community responses to these events, response coordinators are leaving smaller settlements and larger cities in the lurch, squandering human capital. Below are five vital TED talks that every emergency response official should see, with ideas that may help shape their future policy enactment.

Related resource: 50 Most Affordable Schools for an Emergency Management Degree

Rachel Kyte

Situating her first thoughts in her past, Kyte speaks about toughness and kindness in her grandparents, drawing this thread into the present with disasters such as earthquakes in Haiti. She explores the sluggish response to the needs of individuals who have experienced calamity, especially in low- and middle-income nations. Those who can least afford to rebuild, to support themselves in the wake of tragedy, are often those who lose the most regarding essential infrastructure. She then draws in the consideration that accelerating climate shifts disproportionately impact countries too poor to prepare for it, coupled with the expectation of population growth. How do we invest in our resilience? How can emergency response management officials shift disaster preparedness to a more inclusive model that makes it a more significant part of the public discourse?

Caitria and Morgan O’Neal

The sisters explore how the experience of disaster is a potential opportunity to educate and proactively participate in preparedness. By revisiting their time in the aftermath, they also identify problems—communication, allocation of resources, and the assumption of authority in the midst of low-level chaos that can attend disaster sites in America. Emergency management was not being done. No one was in charge or helping people in need. Because the sisters had education and saw the problems at hand, they stepped in and emplaced infrastructure on recovery efforts. Based on their painful experience, they leveraged their skills afterward to build technological tools that could be used by others in future events.

Lucie Ozanne

As a resident of New Zealand, Ozanne explores the question of community resilience and organization. Mapping her thoughts based on research that indicates heightened prosocial cooperation in human groups following disasters, she tells the story of her small town Lyttelton and their response to the Christchurch earthquakes in 2012. The secret to their swift community response was that the township was already invested in alternative economy time banking, and moved quickly to provide care or comfort to neighbors in need. Using her research skills, Ozanne explores how this mindset can be utilized to improve disaster relief efforts in other localities.

Limor Aharonson-Daniel

As the founder of the PReparED Center for Emergency Response Research, Limor examines the need for information and experimental paradigms connected to disasters, natural or anthropogenic. Due to ethical concerns, these cannot be enacted during such emergencies and must be recreated as drills or re-enactments. Her talk centers on the concept of community resilience in the face of disaster and the difficulties she encountered in effectively measuring it, in real time and in retrospect. She found that, after identifying five factors of community resilience and observing different communities during calm or calamity, resilience was greater during times of stress or damage. The question becomes why.

Rohini Swaminathan

Now a geomatician working to reduce disaster damage and loss of life, Swaminathan describes how the experience of working with her father as a teenaged girl to help fishing villages recover after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami impacted her life. The central question she recounts after hearing that people rushed towards the shore to witness the first wave and were subsequently killed by the second is, “Why did this happen?” Her father’s cogent response motivated her, as he advised her to ask instead, “What can I do to prevent this from happening again?” She uses her profession, which collects natural data from around the world, and contrasts natural phenomena with the human response to and philosophies about them.

Each of these talks offers incisive questions asked by educated, motivated individuals from around the world. In every presentation, the response of community members is highlighted—resilience and the reaction of socially cohesive networks, the purpose, and conflict of the human propensity for storytelling, and how information is parsed and shared to most effectively help others. Another point is that resources would be more effectively mobilized if emergency preparedness were a more substantial part of the public discourse. When considering models of response and resource allocation, in terms of timing as well as material and monetary contributions, emergency management professionals can put many of these ideas to good use.