Megacities, Technology and Emergency Preparedness

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Megacities

In the past decade, a large part of our worlds’ population is moving to urban areas, some of which are deemed megacities, containing over 10 million people. Some of these cities and their adjacent communities are Mexico City, Mexico (21,000,000); London, England (14,000,000); Moscow, Russia (14,000,000); and New York, US (24,000,000). What is occurring among these centers are the massive integration of information technology, advanced communication capabilities, along with physical devices connected to ‘some place’ on the internet. Such systems such as SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) are used as industrial control systems to control water treatment plants, power grids and more. 

Additionally, such centers collect data from citizen devices with the “intent to increase efficiency” of government operations while social media is revolutionizing the way leaders interact with them. IBM has had a ‘Smart City’ program for some time and is working with many sectors of our society. Their recent website video elaborates on various poignant issue:

“There are more sensors on our planet than people.”

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being installed into everything” [The internet of things]

“How do you work with it?”

  • Farming

  • Medicine 

  • Cybercrime

“BLOCKCHAIN” = do you know what this is? The explosive use of this process!

Below is a link to IBM’s Smart program:

ibm.com/thought-leadership/smart 


My question to you is = what about emergency and disaster preparedness; business continuity; response policies?