UR22 London

Reflecting on over three decades of personal experience in international humanitarian work, Richard Blewitt, Executive Director of International at the British Red Cross, will open the UR22 London Satellite Hub by providing a humanitarian perspective on the challenges of managing compound risks around the world – illustrated by recent examples of how these risks manifest in humanitarian needs in places such as Somaliland and the Sahel, where people are facing a perfect storm of compounding risks including conflict, drought, flooding, food insecurity and Covid-19.

Every day, thousands of people all over the world are helping their communities to make sense of risk. These community risk practitioners have often been innovating in how to convey risk messages or question information. They are uniquely placed to know what their community knows and needs, but their expertise is often missing from global conversations about risk. Despite the different cultures and varied environments they each work in, they also often have similar needs. Diverse risk practitioners are making many of the same discoveries about what they and their communities need to decide the weight to give to information about risks.
In this discussion, community practitioners will discuss their experiences: what has been successful, what has been challenging, and what do they need in terms of support or tools to be able to ensure their community has risk know-how? The panel will also consider information providers and their role: do they have a responsibility to answer social questions as well as disseminate data?
The session will also consider how the Risk Know-How Framework can be used and applied to offer support and a guiding thread for developing more nuanced community conversations around risk.

The use of personal data and AI technologies offers great potential across many areas of society to improve productivity, standards of living, decision-making and risk management. However, the use of such data and technologies also presents new risks and pitfalls of its own, such as the amplification of existing human biases in decision-making.
As part of the Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll, global attitudes to risk and harm from the use of AI and personal data have been explored on an unprecedented scale: 125,000 interviews with people across 12 countries conducted by Gallup in 2021. To mark the launch of a new report on the findings, this session will discuss what must be done to manage this new area of risk, while still maximising the potential of data and AI to help manage old ones.