Towards an All‑Hazards Approach to Emergency Preparedness and Response: Lessons Learnt from Non‑Nuclear Events
Introduction

Towards an All‑Hazards Approach to Emergency Preparedness and Response: Lessons Learnt from Non‑Nuclear Events, Friday, 12 January 2018 at 13:30-14:30 Paris time

Background

On 12 January 2018, the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) launched its latest report – Towards an All‑Hazards Approach to Emergency Preparedness and Response: Lessons Learnt from Non‑Nuclear Events.

An emergency situation, whether natural or human-made, is a challenge for both political leaders and for those in society who are responsible for managing the related crises. Governments must be able to rely upon a structurally robust system to effectively cope with the complexity, novelty and uncertainty that characterise societal expectations in relation to modern crises.

Nuclear emergency management has long been a focus of the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) in an effort to improve emergency preparedness and response (EPR) at the national and international levels. The Fukushima Daiichi accident clearly showed the importance of an integrated approach when faced with a global event such as the Great East Japan Earthquake and related tsunami in 2011. The Organisation for Economic Co‑operation and Development (OECD), for its part, recommended in 2014 that its member countries "establish and promote a comprehensive, all-hazards and transboundary approach to country risk governance to serve as the foundation for enhancing national resilience and responsiveness".

Guided by this logic, the NEA Working Party on Nuclear Emergency Matters began gathering lessons from non-nuclear events, joining forces with the OECD Working Group on Chemical Accidents, the High‑Level Risk Forum of the OECD Public Governance and Territorial Development Directorate and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. This collaboration resulted in the report, Towards an All‑Hazards Approach to Emergency Preparedness and Response: Lessons Learnt from Non‑Nuclear Events, which confirms similarities in EPR across sectors, identifies lessons learnt and good practices for the benefit of the international community and demonstrates the value of an all‑hazards approach.

William D. Magwood, IV, Director‑General of the NEA, and Thierry Schneider, Director of the French Nuclear Protection Evaluation Centre and Vice-Chair of the NEA Committee on Radiological Protection and Public Health, along with Anthony Cox, Acting Director of the OECD Environment Directorate, and Jack Radisch, Senior Project Manager at the OECD Directorate for Public Governance, provided a briefing for interested professionals, journalists and stakeholders on this major milestone towards building an all‑hazards approach. They then took questions on emergency preparedness and response in the context of an all‑hazards framework and on the interest of engaging international organisations more extensively to build such an approach.

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