International Seminar on Response Diversity

The Scientific Advice Mechanism to the European Commission is collaborating with the Environment & Development Resource Centre and the Stockholm Resilience Centre to host this seminar in Brussels on 24 November. Our Scientific Policy Officer Dr Céline Tschirhart will inaugurate the event, and she will be joined by experts who contributed to the SAPEA Evidence Review Report and Scientific opinion title ‘Strategic Crisis Management in the European Union‘.

As we enter an era of unprecedented turbulence at the planetary level, we urgently need to rethink our crisis management theories, principles, and practices to be fit for purpose in the twenty-first century.

The way we respond to threats to our society is no longer enough for an interconnected, globalised and rapidly changing world. As crises become more complex, their effects can cascade and ripple to all parts of society, the economy, and the environment. They overlap and amplify each other. Their effects are not limited to specific geographical regions or sectors of society, and many continue indefinitely.

Based on the latest scientific evidence, leading experts from across Europe — including the Group of Chief Scientific Advisors to the European Commission — argue that response diversity is one of the key measures needed now.

Response diversity is an important component of resilience and represents the range of different options available to respond to disruptions and threats in general. This is a challenging concept in times when societies often strive to increase efficiency by removing redundancies — but in a dynamic and uncertain world, redundancies and diversity provide multiple options for responding to new and unexpected crises.

The purpose of the event is to discuss how the European Union and its member states could develop proactive measures to deal with multiple and interacting crises, and how the concept of response diversity could be interpreted and implemented in European policy.

Participation in the hybrid seminar is free for European and international policymakers of all levels, professionals active in crisis management and prevention, civil society representatives and academics.