Risk Management

Author : Konstantina Karatzoudi

With the increasing impact of disasters during the recent years, it is becoming more and more crucial to all individuals the contribution to community preparedness and resilience for disasters. This effort to improve community preparedness demands an intimate cooperation where all involved members should be positively motivated and clearly understand their critical role towards the community as community resilience is an effort to create more resisting, capable and more quickly recovering from disasters community. In other words, it is a shared responsibility among government, NGOs and private sector organizations that must cooperate in order to create well prepared communities capable to protect against, respond to and recover from disasters.

It is a common sense that disasters today cause a huge economic impact that preparedness, response and recovery became a community responsibility. This means that governments cannot carry the burden alone but instead of this, federal government, state, local authorities and private sector, they all play important roles towards a common goal, creating preparedness network that could support entire communities. Surprisingly, a non conventional contributor such as private sector has been long a major contributor to humanitarian and social actions.

The growing role of businesses poses an important challenge to traditional humanitarian sector and it is increasingly considered as an alternative to traditional aid agencies. Businesses have repeatedly aided communities affected by disasters and have contributed to strengthen infrastructure or create job after crises and disasters.

However, the question is if the private sector can balance its role in community preparedness with the obligations to its shareholders and their interests and at the same time to examine which is the role of governments and NGOs in this common effort to ensure community resilience.

What are your thoughts?

 Should private sector contribute to community preparedness and resilience?

 

 

 

 

 

Author : Konstantina Karatzoudi

Recently, there is increasing focus on sustainable communities and its sustainable development. One aspect of this development is the achievement of continued power production and for this reason, there a remarkable turn from conventional methods of power production, such as fossil fuels, to more unconventional methods such as those offered by using renewable energy sources. Renewable energy sources are globally becoming a significant source of power, such as wind, solar and biomass which turned to be the majority of new power capacity.

It appears that this renewable type of energy is dynamically entering now the market at a scale relevant in industry terms and at a very competitive price. This impressive change and interest in clean energy has spread all over the world, promising a strong economic future, particularly in developing world. The future of renewable energy is both desirable and essential. For this reason, organizations operating in this field should secure a sustainable development by managing risks that the industry and its renewable energy projects are exposed to.

 Renewable Energy Industry and Risks – A ”bitter” friend….

As investments in renewable energy is continuously growing, so do the risks related to building and operating such plants. The first step towards a successful risk management is the identification of risks that the renewable energy industry is mostly exposed to and has to deal with. The global investment in renewable energy projects is exposed to various risks and should take seriously into considerations.

Those risks include operational risk which can be risk of unplanned plant closure or unavailability of resources caused by a supply chain disruption, financial risk, the risk of insufficient access to funding and capital or fluctuations in prices, political and regulatory risk caused by the continuously changing public policies and regulations, weather related risks which can directly impact the volume of electricity produced. Furthermore, the industry can be exposed to market risk, for example the risk of increase in inputs’ prices or decrease in price of electricity, environmental risk, as there is always the risk that the power plant can damage the environment, business and strategic risk, such as the risk of technological obsolesce as well as building and testing risks caused by property damage during testing new plants.

The wide range of risks that renewable energy industry is exposed to, makes the creation of risk management plan not only necessary but also vital for a sustainable development and business resiliency.

Can you think of other risks?

”More brains, better predictions”

Author : Konstantina Karatzoudi

How important is an effective crisis communication?

It seems that crises and disasters such as natural, man-made disasters and various other disruptive events are an inevitable part of our world. It is critical to organizations to be prepared, handle effectively and overcome such crises, otherwise they can end to be destructive.

It is the way in which an organization handles such crisis situations that determines how the public will respond. When an organization’s actions can be harmful to humans and cause environmental and economic issues, the public and media reactions cannot be avoided. Therefore, it is up to the organization to choose if it will react responsibly in order to prevent future losses or not. It should take seriously into consideration that the possibility of reputational or financial losses still exists even though its crisis preparedness in advance or its response after a crisis has occured.

Effective crisis communication planning is, thus, essential to the success of an organization and it is obvious that the organization has to be quick, consistent and open to communicate correctly during a crisis. Being quick helps the organization to use information in making an active response, while being slow to respond is possible to give free space to others to spread out inaccurate information or attack the organization.

Furthermore, being consistent prevents from misunderstanding among the organization’s communications as one person takes the responsibility to respond during a crisis by keeping consistency throughout his/her communication. At the end, being open and visible during communication reveals that the organization is willing to keep an honest relationship with its stakeholders and gives the message that it does not have something negative to hide and the sign that the situation is under control.

What are your thoughts about crisis communication plans ?

“The exchange of opinions opens our minds and leads to the future”

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