By Rachele Gianfranchi, Director of Public & Government Affairs, Everbridge
Everbridge has been a dedicated Partner of World Climate Summit since 2021. As part of the World Climate Foundation's broad international network, Everbridge raises awareness on climate change risks and engages in collaborative efforts to build climate resilience for the most vulnerable areas of the world. This year, Dominic Jones, Senior Vice President of Business Development & Partner Development for Everbridge will contribute to the Panel Session 'Mobilising Finance for Adaptation - Harnessing Untapped Potential' at World Climate Summit on 13 November in Sharm el-Sheikh.
“We are honored to partner once again with the World Climate Summit at such a pivotal moment of ongoing climate challenges. Everbridge is committed to acting now in driving the innovation and collaboration – with our customers, our partners, and our stakeholders – needed to achieve global climate goals for our industry and beyond.”
Dave Wagner, CEO, Everbridge
Everbridge's Commitment to Building Societal Resilience With End-to-End Public Safety Technology
Governments today are facing a complex risk landscape from climate change, health crises, terrorist attacks, and cybercrime. This includes climate-related disasters rising by a factor of five over approximately the last 50 years, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO, 2021).
Among other interventions, effective adoption and implementation of public safety technology successfully reduced the number of climate disaster-induced casualties by almost threefold between 1970 and 2019 (WMO, 2021). In recent years, risk reduction and resilience-based investments have grown significantly globally. The global landscape of climate finance is estimated at more than US$600 billion per year (CPI, 2021), while in a cross-sectoral recovery action, the European Union committed more than €723 billion (EU Commission, 2020) in post-COVID economic recovery responses for its 27 member states. In both cases, the importance of green transition, technology, and digitalisation are in focus since they ensure sustainable growth and public financial management.
By relying on private providers such as Everbridge with demonstrated success in critical events and emergency management, governments and businesses can avoid significant costs, ensuring return on investment while protecting lives, livelihood, and livestock.
The question governments are increasingly asked by the public is: How can we quickly and effectively respond to risk events and reduce their negative socioeconomic impact? Those companies that adopt a full value chain approach to operational transformations and build capacity for end-to-end crisis management and emergency communications are a step ahead in answering this question. Providing effective early warning technology will make entire countries more resilient towards risk, be it from a climate disaster, critical infrastructure disruption, or health-related events such as the COVID-19 pandemic (McKinsey, 2020). The implications of the global pandemic for companies are that this acted as a stress test for governments and public authorities’ capacity to support their business continuity (ECB, 2021). The pandemic revealed whether central and commercial banks will be prepared to handle large-scale climate risk-induced crises while effectively mitigating smaller, everyday disruptions. The pandemic crisis can be considered a small-scale stress test for the impending climate one.
In the European Union (EU) alone, average economic losses from natural disasters are approximately €12 billion per year, making investment in risk management one of the utmost priorities (World Bank-EU, 2021). One of the largest global re-insurers indicates that the world economy is assessed to lose up to 18% of GDP if no action is taken, and this is expected to increase further as climate mitigation goals fall short of expectations (SwissRe, 2022). The UN estimates that 50% of the total share of climate finance provided by all developed countries and multilateral development banks needs to be allocated to adaptation and resilience (WMO, 2022). Everbridge acknowledges and supplies already 23 nationwide countries, 10 of which are in the EU, with nationwide public warning systems to adapt to the changing climate.
“Climate change is already affecting every region on Earth, in multiple ways. The changes we experience will increase with additional warming,” said IPCC Working Group Co-Chair Panmao Zhai (IPCC, 2021). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 and has 195 nation states among its members. IPCC assessments provide governments, at all levels, with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies. In addition to mitigation efforts, aimed at reducing carbon gas production, it points to the need for governments to rapidly step up investments in climate adaptation and to decrease the risk and costs already produced by climate change.
Everbridge Public Safety Solutions provide cost-effective tools to adapt to the changing climate and increase resilience to its consequences. Its Continual Preparedness System (CPS) responds to the need for emergency management with an all-in-one preparedness platform, which can be built on government premises or hosted on a secure cloud. It will provide: Integrated Planning, Resource Management, GIS, and Communications. Public Warning is a hybrid and modular solution that allows government and public authorities to alert the public via existing Telecom operators’ networks and a vast array of complementary channels to the targeted population, in their language. The Operational Incident Response platform allows to receive and sort the call surge during an emergency and routes responders through a command-and-control dispatch/tracking to guide and monitor official responder teams (firefighters, ambulances, civil protection forces, etc.).
Governments and the financial sector (active in insuring against risk) are increasingly considering complementing mitigation and zero-carbon based policies, with adaptation, transformation, and technological investment in the fight against climate change. The 2020 EU Green Deal, the 2022 US Inflation Reduction Act, and the Indian Officialization of its 2030 climate commitments are all strong signs of acceleration of this global campaign. Investments in public safety systems have a faster ROI and can have a more immediate and direct impact on the reduction of sovereign debt, resilience of populations, safety mission critical of infrastructures, and political capital of governments, globally.
Effective and sustainable use of technology is an enabler for these efforts.
Among the initiatives pursued, governments, especially in developing countries, are required to enhance early warning solutions end-to-end to make sure that at nation-wide level citizens are appropriately informed of a developing disaster. To reach 99% of the population in areas exposed to risk, the use of smartphone applications as a substitution for Cell-Broadcast and/or Location-based SMS is discouraged, because a high penetration rate cannot be achieved based on voluntary downloads (opt-in) only (EENA, 2022; GSMA 2013). Enterprises encourage their employees to download their corporate application, thus performing their duty of care in an effective way.
Everbridge Public Safety Solutions Allow:
Continual preparedness in dynamically managing interrelated teams, supplies, equipment, and tasks of the complex emergency ecosystem; continual review and updating of the system; and more efficient coordination and collaboration among emergency management authorities.
Cell broadcast and Location-based SMS public warning to facilitate immediate public alerts, with single or bi-directional reach, and situational intelligence. These systems allow governments access to risk data feeds through common alerting protocols interfaces, enabling global and regional risk mapping, faster communication, and wider dissemination of alerts. This is along with inclusive accessibility by everyone, including digitally vulnerable populations and language minorities in remote or rural locations, and an increased use of machine-learning capacities to increase effectiveness for responders.
Incident response enabling risk-informed, appropriately orchestrated operations that mobilize and dispatch responders early and cost-effectively. Everbridge public safety solutions such as end-to-end, multi-hazard warning capacities, and responses through control centers enable governments to manage emergency zones.
Since demand for better climate risk preparation remains still largely unmet in the industry sector, as well as in developing countries, Everbridge Business and Partner Development are also increasingly working towards innovative and alternative combinations of technology and finance. Reputation, compliance, and business resilience (including financial risk) make up three main reasons why enterprises and governments would invest in cost-effective tools to adapt to the changing climate. Insurance-based finance can compound their resilience to climate risk even before a critical event is triggered.
In addition, ESG, sustainability reporting policies and regulatory requirements are expanding the need for documented processes and yearly improvements on the resilience to risk baselines. These need data collection, analysis, alert and response. With 20 years of experience in critical event management and through its global footprint, Everbridge can provide a unique digital product offer for governments and corporates.
“While Everbridge’s technology helps organizations prepare for and manage critical events, a major catastrophe requires capital to fund a comprehensive emergency response. Index-based insurance can mobilize that capital quickly and reliably. Bringing together these two critical components of resilience – public safety technology and insurance-based capital – can help prevent the loss of lives and infrastructure by facilitating a faster, more organized response and shortening the period of time between a major event occurring and people receiving needed funds – thus, expediting the recovery.”
Dominic Jones, Senior Vice President of Business & Partner Development, Everbridge
Partnerships between the public and private sectors are key in this endeavor. Tech-savvy private sector organizations like Everbridge offer governments sophisticated, tested, and compliant emergency management solutions that enable climate adaptation in a sustainable way. Partnership with the private sector protects governments from the rapid technological obsolescence of improvised do-it-yourself solutions. For a private sector company, constant investment and upgrading of its products among a vast array of customers’ needs ensures sustained best performance and functionalities in the long run.
With the mission of keeping people safe and organizations running, Everbridge has twenty years of public safety experience and a global presence spanning five continents. Technology solutions are developed to support public safety in all its multiple aspects, such as national emergency management, cybersecurity, and business and digital operations, all contributing to strengthen societal resilience, a prime government responsibility. Effective end-to-end emergency management and the ability to coordinate responder forces all while optimizing operations allows national, regional, and local authorities to be prepared, respond quickly, and reach everyone, maximizing public safety and protecting political capital.
About Everbridge
Everbridge, Inc. (NASDAQ: EVBG) is a global software company that helps companies and public sector authorities anticipate, respond, and adapt to risk by centralizing business intelligence, communications, and crisis management. Our Critical Event Management (CEM) software solutions are trusted by over 6,200 customers across 76 countries, and over 23 national disaster prevention authorities use the Everbridge Public Warning Center to alert their populations. In addition to direct customer sales, and referrals, Everbridge goes to market via qualified partners to broaden our distribution and reach. Through market-leading solutions and the Everbridge Partner Program, we can grow our mutual business together and keep people safe.
Learn more: www.everbridge.com
About the author
Rachele leads Everbridge Government Affairs since January 2021, driving the institutional dialogue at international level on Everbridge’s Public Safety portfolio as instruments of climate adaptation. Her thought leadership is actively promoting Everbridge’s contribution to SDGs and sustainability, draws attention to private-public cooperation, and support the engagement in EU’s Horizon Europe research and innovation. Rachele has 20 years of experience matured at the World Bank, the EU Commission, and as a firm founder. She holds a Master in International Affairs from The Johns Hopkins University- SAIS, speaks four languages, and is based in The Netherlands with her family since 2014.