DISASTER RESPONSEHow Big Institutions Stymie Disaster Response, and What to Do About It
Large institutions like government, the private sector, non-profits, and academia, are unprepared for disasters—both natural and human-created—because their incentives are not well-aligned.
Jeff Schlegelmilch is keeping busy. This year, as the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia Climate School, where he is the director, marks its 20th anniversary, Schlegelmilch is leading the center’s activities and anniversary events, teaching at the Climate School, and releasing a book.
Schlegelmilch co-wrote the new book, Catastrophic Incentives, with Ellen Carlin, research professor at Georgetown University. In it, the authors draw on their experiences confronting health and other disasters to explain why large institutions like government, the private sector, non-profits, and academia, are unprepared for disasters—both natural and human-created—and how their incentives could be realigned. (The book focuses primarily, though not exclusively, on how these institutions operate in the United States). As Catastrophic Incentives hits the shelves, Columbia News caught up with Schlegelmilch to discuss his book, his reading list, and which disaster manager from history he’d most want to invite over for dinner.
How did this book come about? How did you and your co-author decide to write together, and what did you think each of you could bring to it as authors?
This book started after my co-author, Ellen Carlin, and I wrote an op-ed early on in the COVID-19 pandemic and were then looking at the range of things we could discuss in another piece. We started discussing doing a series of op-eds, and eventually realized a book would be the best vehicle for saying all we wanted to say.
Essentially, we were looking at all of the discussions around the causes and critiques of the responses to the pandemic after each of us had spent years working on public health preparedness. We realized that there were important undercurrents that were not being talked about, and that there were root causes of why the knowledge available was not optimally informing the response, and that this was not isolated to COVID-19, but was pervasive across hazards.
