Page 164 - Risk Management in current scenario

components of mankind useful for drinking, agriculture etc. Excess or
shortages of water are a threat through the flood, or excess rain, or
drought impacting ability to produce food grains and drinking.

These first three fundamental components form the basis of any economy
and demography in the world. The other two components "Space" and"
Fire" are enablers/facilitator for survival in conjunction with the first three
elements. The entire economic and demographic developments are
therefore a combination of the five essential components of which the
human and the world is made up of. It is impossible that impacts on the
building blocks are not made before any major disaster.

The other ways of destruction could be from manmade creations; in the
current context, this could be due to use of a weapon of mass destruction,
or terror attack, or extreme climate conditions, human behaviors such
as too much optimism, overconfidence, part of the masses, greed etc.

So any ominous sign of future disaster will always be available either
individually from any one of the five fundamental elements or in one or
more combination of these five fundamental elements. All the examples
of stated debacles have shown the involvement of human behavior. The
titanic incidence was from overconfidence, 1929 stock market crash
where people followed the masses without looking at the actual
economic reality, similarly, the burst of the dot-com bubble was a
combination of greed and quick profit, while 2008 economic crisis was
many factors of human behavior. The tragedies resulted in a loss of lives
is attributed to either negligence, not following the process or
management responsibilities.

In none of the above debacles over last 100 years impacted any of the
individual five fundamental elements directly, but rather the impact was
in a form of the combination as" economy". However, this is changing
now, and the current signs are more ominous than ever before coming
from "Air", pollution, change in environment leading to extreme weather

162 | Risk Management in Current Scenario