We use foresight to imagine anticipatory adaptations to disruptive future change.
Context
Critical infrastructures provide the services we can't live without.
We depend on them to reliably and affordably supply clean water, electricity, food, healthcare, education, transport, access to the internet and financial services everyday without interruption. They have become so essential to our lives that we often don't notice they're there until they stop working.
But they face significant challenges. They are aging, expensive, and increasingly exposed and vulnerable to emerging risks - from technology and climate change, to space weather and cyber-physical attacks - that are systemic, more complex, uncertain and fast changing. They are also interconnected and interdependent, meaning that disruptions in one sector, such as energy, can quickly cascade through others connected to it, making future crises more frequent, severe and widespread.
In the United Kingdom, there are 13 critical infrastructures.
In response to these challenges, a growing dialogue at national and international levels is already highlighting the urgent need to strengthen resilience across each of these, shown in SDG 9, the Paris Agreement, the Sendai Framework and the UK Government Resilience Framework. There is also now a compelling economic case to proactively invest in resilience, though as a society we have historically fallen short.
One of the reasons for this is the way we deal with risk struggles with long-term thinking. Immediate concerns dominate, driven by reactive top-down approaches and a disaster economy that prioritises short-term fixes over sustainable solutions. We defer action, kick problems down the road, implementary temporary measures that fail fast and manage risk reductively, focusing narrowly on hazards rather than addressing underlying exposures and vulnerabilities that make them problematic in the first place.
This means that when risks do manifest, they become harder to manage, are likely to rapidly escalate into crises, and create chaotic situations. This is not just hypothetical but a pressing issue demanding attention and action.
miniMAX was created in response to this, aiming to minimise loss in worst-case scenarios. We do this in two ways:
(1) Engage the public to enhance emerging risk awareness and preparedness at individual, household, and community levels.
(2) Use foresight to research and imagine tools and products that anticipate and help people be more resilient to future disruptions.
Approach
There have been many attempts to identify uncertainty and characterise disruptive change, as well as others that provide guidance for societal resilience building.
However, there isn't yet a framework for assessing the implications of emerging and future risks to critical infrastructure in a standardised way, that proceeds from risk analysis towards resilience and adaptation in a coherent foresight-driven loop that effectively connects to public conversations on where to proactively intervene and invest to enhance capacity across the resilience cycle.
Without this integrative piece, an opportunity space has surfaced. In it, we use our Anticipate - Characterise - Assess - Design - Articulate (ACADA) framework. This guides all of our work and the creation of our preparedness guidance and anticipatory adaptations.
Work
We view the cultivation of resilience as a deeply socially involved activity, aligning with the UK Government's vision of a 'whole-of-society' approach. This means that creating useful and accessible information on how individuals, households and communities can prepare for disruptive future change is also important.
This, alongside our anticipatory adaptations can be found below.
miniMAX is participating in its first project with a university partner toward the end of 2024. More details on this and others will be found in a Projects tab soon.
Information and guidance booklets detailing how you can prepare for disruptions to services you need the most.
Creating knowledge about the future isn't enough. Explore our database of anticipatory adaptations to emerging and future risks.
© 2024 by miniMAX
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miniMAX is a foresight design studio imagining adaptations to disruptive future change.
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