Richard Gordon
Director of Bournemouth University Disaster Management Centre (BUDMC)
Over 22 years Richard has designed, coordinated and delivered projects within twenty-nine countries and regions across the Middle East, West Africa, South and East Asia, Western and Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. In addition, Richard is frequently requested to deliver discrete executive briefings and seminars to senior government ministers and their trusted representatives including key military appointments and overseas delegations. His work includes the development of current and emerging leaders within government as well as private and public sector businesses. Areas of focus have included the development of situational awareness and integrated planning, multi-agency command, control and coordination systems, risk assessment and early warning systems, and community-based risk reduction and communication strategies.
More recently Richard has addressed the need to examine why ‘lessons that have been identified’ from previous emergencies and crises often fail to be turned into ‘lessons that have been learned’. Richard explores the use of innovative immersive scenarios that ‘re-imagine’ past scenarios within different contexts and are delivered using a unique scenario delivery software platform: Stormkestrel. By running scenarios for multiple leadership groups Richard explores whether decision making is in any way impacted by post-disaster reports and recommendations.
Richard has also published work that explores the concept and importance of ‘policy domains’ within national disaster management governance as well as the integration of the travel and tourism sectors and public health sectors (both public and private) with national emergency management risk reduction, response and recovery strategies and protocols.
Richard is a Fellow of the Institute of Civil Protection and Emergency Management (ICPEM).
Session: Human crisis
The good news is that most countries impacted by natural disasters are not left alone. National governments, international responders, and non governmental organisations all commit themselves to arrive in-country as quickly as possible to deliver humanitarian assistance operations. From a project manager’s perspective this raises a number of interesting challenges.
Firstly, many responding organisations (international, national and non governmental) are often already well established within the stricken country prior to the natural disaster impacting, having previously arrived as an agent of ‘disaster response’ to an earlier disaster, and then stayed on to beome an agent of ‘development’. Now, many others arrive with their own (often conflicting or duplicating) key objectives, systems and procedures. Whilst the United Nations has established systems and procedures for coordinating and monitoring multiple agencies and organisations in the delivery of humanitarian assistance, such systems sometimes take insufficient cognisance of the host country’s own national disaster management structures and systems. This presentation introduces delegates to some of these humanitarian assistance challenges and invites discussion as to how multi-agency, multi-national and multi-dimensional humanitarian-aid missions can be better coordinated and synchronised with the stricken government and its communities.