Submission by Hazards Forum to the House of Lords Select Committee on National Resilience

Background

In March 2026, the House of Lords Committee on National Resilience published a call for written evidence for its inquiry into national and local preparedness and resilience. It was inviting interested individuals and organisations to submit their views on these issues.

The House of Lords Select Committee on National Resilience was appointed on 27 January 2026. It is chaired by Baroness Coussins and will report by 30 November 2026. This inquiry will address the current context for preparedness and resilience, including the threats which the UK currently faces; how to achieve a whole of society approach in which everyone plays a role in achieving resilience; the interconnectedness of risks across different threats, sectors, countries, and timeframes; and strategic gaps which could be addressed, including in the private sector.

Hazards Forum was invited to submit evidence for the inquiry, and it responded to two questions.

Hazards Forum response to Question 1: How far are national and international risks inter-connected, including across different sectors and across short-term and long-term risks, and what are the implications for the national approach towards preparedness and resilience?

The interconnected nature of national and international risks

The Hazards Forum’s October 2025 workshop on Cascading and Interconnected Hazards, convened with participants from across engineering, safety, regulation, nuclear, defence, infrastructure and academia, provides direct evidence relevant to this question. Our submission draws on the collective expertise and discussion outputs from that event.

The nature and extent of risk interconnection

National and international risks are deeply and increasingly interconnected across sectors, timescales and geographies. The workshop examined real-world examples that illustrate how a hazard originating in one domain rapidly propagates into others:

the Fukushima disaster combined seismic, flooding and nuclear consequences
the 2025 Spain and Portugal power outage demonstrated how failure in energy infrastructure cascades into economic, social and public safety impacts
the Texas winter storm of 2021 showed how AI-managed energy grid systems can amplify rather than moderate the effects of an extreme weather event

These are not isolated incidents, but emblematic of a structural shift. As populations, infrastructure and processes become more interconnected, and as digital systems, supply chains and environmental systems increasingly span national borders, the boundaries between sectors that traditional risk management treats as distinct are becoming unreliable. In short, what was once a localised failure can now propagate at speed across critical systems.

The workshop identified that risks do not simply co-exist but interact and compound, either simultaneously or in succession, in ways that conventional risk assessment frameworks are ill-equipped to anticipate. Linear cause-and-effect models, exemplified by the bow-tie diagram familiar to safety practitioners, are increasingly inadequate representations of the highly interdependent systems with multiple feedback loops that now characterise our critical infrastructure and natural environment.

Short-term and long-term risk: a false separation

The workshop highlighted that the distinction between short-term and long-term risks can itself become a source of systemic vulnerability. Decisions taken in response to short-term operational pressures, such as optimising for efficiency over resilience, can over time erode the buffers that protect against long-term or low-frequency, high-consequence events. Legacy nuclear waste management and climate change were cited as cases in which the consequences of inaction compound over time, and where the interconnection between near-term decisions and long-term outcomes is poorly understood and inadequately communicated to decision-makers.

This creates a particular challenge for national preparedness: the planning cycles and accountability structures of government and industry are often misaligned with the timescales over which cascading risks develop and interact.

Implications for national preparedness and resilience

The workshop’s findings point to several implications for national approach:

Resilience must take precedence over optimisation. The Spanish power grid failure was cited as a direct consequence of insufficient resilience in a highly centralised system. A more distributed architecture would have contained the failure. National preparedness frameworks should evaluate whether efficiency-driven design choices in critical infrastructure are creating systemic vulnerabilities to cascading failure.
Risk assessment must shift toward consequence-based thinking. Rather than attempting to enumerate all possible initiating events (a task increasingly futile in complex, interdependent systems), preparedness planning should focus on the right-hand (consequences) side of the bowtie: asking whether barriers and response capabilities are sufficient to limit consequences once an event is under way. This reframing also supports better decision-making under uncertainty, which is an unavoidable feature of the turbulent, uncertain, novel and ambiguous environment in which we now operate.
Cross-sector knowledge sharing is a national resilience asset. The workshop found that knowledge about complex hazards and effective mitigation is largely siloed within sectors and organisations, and that sharing is most likely to occur in non-competitive environments. The aviation industry was cited as a model for systematic cross-sector learning. National resilience frameworks should invest in creating structured, trusted forums for inter-sector intelligence sharing, treating the quality of that knowledge network as a component of national resilience in its own right.
Communication failures are a systemic risk. Across all three workshop discussions, communication emerged as a critical vulnerability: between engineers and senior leaders, between technical specialists and the public, and between risk professionals and regulators. Where risk information is poorly framed, misunderstood or simply not transmitted upward with sufficient clarity, decision-making is impaired at precisely the moments when it matters most. Preparedness frameworks must treat communication capability, not just technical risk assessment, as a core competency.
Competence and judgement matter as much as data. In novel or unprecedented scenarios, engineering judgement is essential. Yet that judgement depends on competence that is maintained, tested and honest about its own limits. The workshop found that individuals’ ability to exercise sound judgement is uneven, and that admitting uncertainty is not yet sufficiently normalised in professional practice. National resilience planning should support cultures where limits of knowledge are surfaced rather than concealed.

Conclusion

The interconnection of risks is a present reality, as recent events in the UK and around the world have demonstrated. Existing preparedness frameworks were largely designed for a world in which risks were more bounded, more predictable, and more separable, but that world is changing. The Hazards Forum recommends that the Committee consider the structural shift from linear to systemic risk as the central framing challenge for national resilience, and that cross-sector learning, consequence-focused planning and communication competence be elevated as national resilience priorities alongside technical risk assessment capability.

Hazards Forum response to Question 2: What national risks could have the most severe impact in a reasonable worst-case scenario, including nuclear accidents and loss of control of satellite communications?

National risks with the most severe impact in a reasonable worst-case scenario

The Hazards Forum draws on two bodies of evidence to address this question: our October 2025 workshop on Cascading and Interconnected Hazards, and our dedicated event on space weather and its potential impact on critical national infrastructure. Together, these point to a category of risk that the Committee should treat as a priority concern: low-frequency, high-consequence events that interact with and amplify vulnerabilities across multiple critical systems simultaneously.

Space weather as a severe and underestimated national risk

Extreme space weather, in particular, coronal mass ejections (CMEs) producing intense geomagnetic storms, represents one of the most severe risks in any reasonable worst-case scenario assessment. Unlike many hazards, a major space weather event does not respect sector boundaries. It has the potential to simultaneously affect power transmission, satellite communications, aviation, rail networks and nuclear facilities across the UK and internationally.

The Hazards Forum’s space weather event highlighted the scale of the monitoring challenge. The Met Office’s Space Weather Operations Centre has invested significantly in new operational models through the £20 million SWIMMR programme, including development of the GORGON model for forecasting Geomagnetic Induced Current (GIC) in power and rail networks. Yet even with these advances, a critical warning window problem remains, namely coronal mass ejections offer only around 20 minutes of warning. This interval is wholly insufficient for managed, coordinated responses across complex national systems.

The May 2024 Gannon storm, rated G5 (the highest category), offered a real-world demonstration of the disruption potential, causing disruptions to aircraft and ground electronics and necessitating flight path adjustments.

The cascading potential of such an event is acute. A severe geomagnetic storm capable of damaging high-voltage transformers in the national grid would trigger electricity outages affecting all systems dependent on power: communications, transport management, water treatment, hospitals and financial infrastructure. Critically, there is concern that plant operators may disconnect assets due to poor information, itself risking cascading blackouts. This is a sobering illustration of how the response to a hazard can compound its consequences if not carefully managed.

Nuclear facilities and space weather: an insufficiently recognised intersection

The question specifically raises nuclear accidents as a severe risk category, and space weather introduces a dimension that is not yet adequately addressed in nuclear safety thinking internationally.

A recent NEA (Nuclear Energy Agency) report has raised concerns that GIC (Geomagnetic Induced Current) risks to nuclear power plants may not be adequately considered, with only Canada, Sweden and the UK, all at high geographic latitudes, currently accounting for space weather in nuclear plant design and operation. This is a significant gap given that GIC vulnerability may be determined less by geography and more by electrical line connectivity and geology – factors that apply across a much wider range of sites globally.

The NEA has recommended that nuclear power plant operators review their plant safety cases for GIC risks, and the Hazards Forum supports this as an urgent priority. The interaction between an extreme space weather event and a nuclear facility experiencing GIC-induced equipment failures represents a compound scenario – natural hazard meeting engineered system vulnerability – of the kind that our cascading hazards workshop identified as the most challenging and dangerous class of risk.

Satellite communications: systemic dependency and fragility

Loss or degradation of satellite communications would have consequences far beyond the obvious disruption to navigation and telecommunications. Modern critical infrastructure, including energy grid management, financial transactions, precision agriculture, emergency services coordination and military operations, is deeply dependent on satellite timing signals and data relay. Risks to satellites from increasing orbital congestion were highlighted at our space weather event, adding a human-made dimension to the natural hazard risk. A severe space weather event coinciding with elevated orbital congestion could produce a compounding scenario in which both the event itself and the collision debris it generates degrade satellite availability over an extended period.

The need for real-time forecasting models for extreme events, such as those seen in March 1991 and May 2024, to enhance satellite safety is well understood by the technical community, but the translation of that understanding into resilience planning across satellite-dependent industries remains immature. The Hazards Forum notes that industries currently lack mature approaches for infrequent hazards such as extreme space weather – a systemic preparedness gap that is directly relevant to the Committee’s question.

The compounding risk: when space weather meets interconnected infrastructure

The severity of a reasonable worst-case space weather scenario is not simply a function of the physical event itself, but of the degree to which modern infrastructure has developed interdependencies that were not present during previous extreme solar events.

Our cascading hazards workshop found that linear cause-and-effect models are increasingly inadequate representations of the highly interdependent systems with multiple feedback loops that now characterise critical infrastructure. An event on the scale of the largest magnetic storm on record, the so-called Carrington Event of 1859, before electrified grids, digital communications and satellite networks existed, would be categorically different in its consequences.

Implications for national preparedness

The Hazards Forum draws the following conclusions for national resilience planning in relation to this risk category:

Extreme space weather should be treated as a Tier 1 national risk with dedicated cross-sector resilience planning, recognising its potential to simultaneously degrade power, communications, transport, and nuclear safety systems.
The 20-minute CME warning window demands pre-authorised, pre-rehearsed response protocols across grid operators, nuclear facility managers, aviation authorities, and satellite operators — not guidance that requires real-time deliberation.
Nuclear safety cases should be reviewed for GIC exposure as a matter of regulatory priority, particularly given the NEA’s finding that this risk is inadequately characterised at most facilities internationally.
Resilience by design, including shielding, redundancy, and passive systems, should be mandated for critical national infrastructure procured or upgraded going forward, with space weather tolerance specified as a design requirement rather than left as an afterthought.
Historical data must inform, but not constrain, worst-case planning. Large error bars in extreme event predictions due to limited data remain a challenge, and planners should be cautious about anchoring preparedness to the observed record when the physical science suggests more extreme events are possible.

The Hazards Forum is committed to supporting further cross-sector work in this area, including through exercises, scenario planning, and the kind of interdisciplinary knowledge sharing that our workshop programme is designed to facilitate.