My daily routine assumes the internet survives the disaster
When people picture disaster risk, the mental image tends to be physical: earthquakes, floods, a storm making landfall. The new report When digital systems fail: The hidden risks of our digital world — co-authored by UNDRR (where I work), ITU, and Sciences Po — challenges that mental model. Digital infrastructure failure is a disaster, and the risk frameworks we use to prepare for one largely don't treat it that way.
The scenarios the report calls out are worth sitting with. A severe solar storm could disable satellites, disrupt navigation, and destabilize energy grids — with recovery times measured in months. Extreme temperatures can overwhelm data centers, cascading into healthcare and financial failures. An earthquake can sever submarine cables and leave entire nations offline for weeks. None of these are cyberattacks. They're physics.
The part I keep returning to: "societies have grown dependent on digital systems without maintaining analogue skills and ensuring adequate fallback options." That's not a warning about future dependency — it's a description of now. Paper records, manual processes, and cash transactions have been wound down to the point where, in many contexts, there simply is no graceful degradation mode.
I don't keep much cash at home. In a scenario where the banking system went dark for a week — not hacked, just down, after a big enough solar event — I genuinely don't know how I'd manage basic purchases. That's not a niche concern. Most people in high-income countries are in exactly the same position. That's the structural gap the report is pointing at: we've optimized for digital dependency without building in the capacity to recover from losing it.
The UNDRR head Kamal Kishore put it directly: "Digital infrastructure must be resilient infrastructure." The report is worth reading alongside the work UNDRR has been doing to make disaster risk economics legible to policymakers — this is the next layer of the same argument.