Some risks seem to grab the headlines more than others; this doesn’t mean these other ones have gone away, of course.  I’ve just read through Aon’s research into what they term ‘underrated threats’.  While Aon make a distinction between insurable and uninsurable risks, this clearly doesn’t mean that these risks are not being managed (or underrated) just because someone hasn’t bought a policy.  After all, risk transfer is just one of four options in popular risk management methods, and insurance is only one tool in the risk transfer tool-kit at that.  Nonetheless, Aon pick up on cyber crime, terrorism, unethical behaviour, talent attraction/retention, pension scheme funding, risk interdependency, and pandemic/health risks as those warranting higher levels of executive attention.

Pandemic risk caught my attention as I’ve spent the past week in Vietnam and the threat of “bird flu” featured prominently in two editions of Viet Nam News, which may have been coincidence but taken at face value the authorities are flagging this as a serious, high likelihood event with high levels of infection among tested poultry detected already this year.  The concern focuses on H5N1 and H7N9 strains of avian influenza.

Aon’s perspective is that any breakout would quickly spread due to dramatic increases in international travel and that consequent travel restrictions would also create supply chain discontinuities, especially if supply is concentrated in affected regions of countries with limited options to set up new sources of supply due to travel restrictions.  Aon also imply that the source of the next pandemic may well be from the Asian region which is becoming ever more influential in global supply chains, hence the impact could well be greater than that seen in past outbreaks such as with SARS.

Pandemic risk hasn’t gone away and experience from “swine flu” back in 2009 shows that it can arise and spread quickly.  Research by the Business Continuity Institute back in 2013 showed that many risk specialists were concerned about the lack of effectiveness of future antibiotics in their horizon scanning; so the environment that we are likely to face when the next pandemic alert is announced will be materially different from the last time. Planning and preparedness starts now.