Why Governments Will Never Build Effective Disaster Early Warning Networks

We do have the technology and the social and economic need to create effective disaster early warning systems in all modern societies.  And yes,  the "conventional wisdom" is that Governments or insurance companies should build them!  The fact remains obvious that neither governments nor insurance companies have built suchs systems nor are they ever likely to do so.  Governments will not do this because the people who actually make government policy and spending decisions have very little political incentive to create a disaster warning network that can save lives and reduce property damages.  The risks and challenges in actually creating such a system far exceed the small potential political gain by decision makers. Governments do however achieve substantial political benefit from disaster planning and repeated calls for future action.  Politicians always find that disaster recovery funding gets a lot more political support for them than prevention of death and property loss.  Standing on a soapbox and writing disaster relief checks is the long preferred method of dealing with disasters.  Long term actions required for implementation of an effective early warning network create minimal political gain and therefore are not likely to ever be accomplished.  This is the sad reality, but reality is not an optional choice. 

Insurance companies will not build or fund disaster warning systems because they operate as individual entities. Each individual insurance company has no economic incentive to reduce overall deaths and property damages in society.  Insurance companies insure risk.  With less risk, there will be less to insure.  There is no "common" good served for any one company to create and implement a warning system and they have no framework for cooperative actions of this type.  It is not a core competency of insurance companies. Their profit motive is not served for all risk to be reduced, only the risk for each companies insured's.

Opportunity is created by the ability and willingness to solve major problems in people's lives. The time has come to build an effective Disaster Warning Network.  What do you think?

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