Ebola has proven how disruptive disease can be. Businesses must be prepared

Companies from Disney to Aecom must prepare for the impact of infectious diseases, warns sustainability officer at SXSW Eco

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When Ebola broke out in Liberia, 10,000 employees of Aecom Technology Corporation moved out of the country. Their work on new rail infrastructure and public housing in the nation of four million ground to a standstill. Many others have done likewise. As horrific as Ebola has proven to be, the risk of disease across the world’s tropical zone is oftenconsidered alongside questions of resource availability, infrastructure conditions to move goods and services, and political stability as businesses scout new overseas locations.

It’s something that companies operating in the global north – including the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida – need to start planning around, according to Gary Lawrence, Aecom’s vice president and chief sustainability officer. In fact, the public-health challenges of so many converging global threats are so daunting that addressing them will take much more dialogue and collaboration across sectors than is currently happening.

Addressing an audience gathered Tuesday at the SXSW Eco conference in Austin, Texas, Lawrence said: “Communicable disease is one of the major risks all of us face when we’re thinking about these questions of water, food, energy.”

Lawrence told the SXSW audience that he recently had to warn the leadership of Disney that they must prepare against the possible threat of dengue fever, which has seen a recent outbreak in Florida.

“Disney World requires customers to be outside in order to make a profit,” Lawrence said. “How is Disney going to manage the risks of dengue if dengue moves that far up the panhandle and makes it almost impossible for anybody to go outside at dawn or dusk when the mosquitos are active? … There is no greater financial risk to Disney in Orlando than not having people able to come because of an infectious disease problem.

“We don’t normally talk about that as an engineering firm, but it is going to be a problem in terms of how you actually create an outdoor environment that protects people from this disease.”

Thanks to the increase in temperatures, in part due to global warming, mosquito-borne malaria, dengue fever, and West Nile virus are already marching north. The same is true of Valley fever in the western US. Dengue fever is advancing on Australia and public health officials in theUnited Kingdom have been sounding the alarm about malaria.

Collaboration is the only way forward

Lawrence’s sustainability credentials are impressive. In Seattle, he led the creation of the first municipal sustainability plan in the US (one of the first globally) and has served as an advisor to President Clinton’s Administration Council on Sustainable Development as well as similar bodies in South America and Europe, including the European Academy for the Urban Environment in Berlin and the Organization for Economic and Community Development in Paris.

In the private sector, he worked as a sustainability leader at international consulting and engineering firm, Arup, before joining Aecom Technology Corporation more recently.

In a session titled “Climate Change and the Bottom Line: Risk and Reward” at SXSW Eco, a three-day conference on matters of environmental sustainability from tech to policy to design and grassroots advocacy, Lawrence said the greatest challenge to responding to growing risk – from infectious disease to sea-level rise – involves communication and collaboration.

The habit of thinking “in sectors” needs to change, he said.

“The coasts are sinking faster than sea level is rising, but we don’t have conversations about that at all because it requires we get geologists involved in this discussion and what do geologists have to do with sustainability? Well, in that context they have everything to do with sustainability.”

In another example of compartmentalized thinking, he credited the United Nations for its tremendous vision of poverty relief but claimed the intergovernmental organization simply doesn’t understand how money works. Worse: its bureaucrats have a generalized distrust of the private sector. For its part, the private sector has a jaded view of governments, which are often corrupt and in many ways function on bribes, Lawrence said.

“The question for us and the UN is, can we both recognize we have aspects of evil within us that need to be curbed if we’re actually going to help optimize conditions for poor people in the world.”

Attempting to put the climate challenge in perspective, he commented on the world’s obsession over the Malaysian jetliner that went missing in March with hundreds of passengers on board. If the planet reaches a six-degree Celsius rise in average temperatures in 100 years, as is projected, “the effect on human population will be as if 1000 airliners a day were crashing.”

Those impacts are expected to come from a variety of sources, including heatwaves, extreme weather events, drought, and the spread of disease – potentially exacerbated by governmental inaction and resource disparities.

How will such dire predictions impact Western development when it comes to infectious disease planning in the near-term?

Despite his personal encouragements, Lawrence told the Guardian he is not optimistic.

“Sadly, that’s because most of the people who are dying are poor. When a Western industrial society starts to collapse related to disease … someone is going to decide, ‘Ah, this is a problem that has to be solved.’ It’s not a problem that has to be solved yet.”

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http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/oct/09/ebola-infectious-disease-sustainability-concern-sxsw-eco-austin