The Risk Academy

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The government's about to tell every UK household to start stocking food and water. If you've seen the headlines this week, you'll know why: extreme weather, cyberattacks on infrastructure, and rising risk from hostile states are all being cited as reasons to build a home emergency supply.

Problem is, most people's "stockpile" is a few tins that get eaten within a month and never replaced.

If you're taking this seriously, worth looking at ReadyWise. Their emergency food kits are freeze-dried, rated for up to a 25-year shelf life, and just need water to prepare. No rotating stock every 6 months, no wondering if it's gone off when you actually need it.

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All Long-term Freeze-dried Food for Emergency and Outdoor use.

📚 Over the last few weeks we've been spotlighting resources we think are genuinely worth knowing about if you work in security, risk, or the humanitarian space. Here's a look back at everything we've covered:

🌍 GISF (Global Interagency Security Forum) — where we started this series, a member-led network with a brilliant free resource library covering partnerships, duty of care, training, and more.

🛡️ INSO (International NGO Safety Organisation) — live, on-the-ground security coordination and incident analysis for NGOs in high-risk countries.

📊 Aid Worker Security Database — the data behind aid worker security, tracking global incident trends over time.

🔍 Insecurity Insight — research on threats to aid workers, healthcare workers, and civilians in conflict-affected settings.

📚 Humanitarian Outcomes — the research consultancy behind some of the sector's most-cited security studies.

🎓 Humanitarian Leadership Academy — free and low-cost training covering humanitarian and security-adjacent skills.

🖥️ DisasterReady — another strong free training platform for humanitarian and development workers.

🔐 Security in-a-Box — a practical digital security toolkit for protecting your devices and communications.

🕵️ Surveillance Self-Defense — clear, practical guidance on protecting your privacy and reducing your digital footprint.

⚖️ ICoCA — the oversight body setting standards for private security providers.

Nine resources, all free, all genuinely useful, and all just a search away.

We'd love to know:
❓ Which of these have you used, and what did you think?
❓ What did we miss?

Drop your own recommendations below, we'll happily check them out.

Home Join a global training academy built by experienced UK special forces practitioners, not theorists. One annual membership gives you access to over 500 FREE CPD and professional development courses, plus the option to buy and enrol on lots of highly specialist risk training when required.

🛡️ Resource Spotlight: ICoCA (International Code of Conduct Association)

ICoCA is the main oversight and accountability body for private security providers operating in complex, high-risk environments. They maintain standards, handle certification, and provide a mechanism for raising concerns about provider conduct.

Genuinely useful if you're an NGO, contractor, or organisation that engages private security providers and wants to understand what "good" looks like, or what standards to hold a provider to.

🔗 https://icoca.ch/

❓ Have you ever had to vet or select a private security provider? What mattered most in that decision?

Home - ICoCA - International Code of Conduct Association PROMOTING RESPONSIBLE PRIVATE SECURITY

The Government Just Told You to Stock Up. Here's What Household Emergency Preparedness Actually Means

The UK government is about to tell every household to stock tinned food and bottled water. It's a good start, but it's not preparedness. It's a shopping list.

Why the Cabinet Office Is Sounding the Alarm Now

This week, The Guardian confirmed that a new Cabinet Office campaign will urge UK citizens to build basic supplies at home. The plan covers two connected threats: extreme weather events like the wildfires that tore through the West Midlands this August, and the growing risk from hostile state activity, including cyberattacks on national infrastructure.

The goal, according to government sources, is simple. If most households can cope for the first few days of a crisis without help, the emergency services can focus on the people who genuinely need it.

That's a sound principle. Consequently, it puts the UK roughly where the EU already stands. Brussels told 450 million citizens to hold 72 hours of supplies back in 2025, citing the same overlapping risks: war, cyberattacks, climate change and disease.

However, a tin of beans and a case of water bottles will not tell you when to leave your home versus when to stay put. They will not tell your household what to do if the mobile network goes down. That's where household emergency preparedness training closes the gap the government's list leaves open.

What "Stock Up" Actually Misses

A stockpile answers one question: do you have supplies? It doesn't answer the questions that decide whether a crisis stays manageable or turns into a genuine emergency.

Do you know your local risks? Flood zone, wildfire exposure, proximity to critical infrastructure. Every postcode carries a different risk profile.

Can you make the shelter-or-evacuate call under pressure? Most people freeze on this decision precisely because they've never rehearsed it.

Does everyone in your household know the plan? A plan that lives only in one person's head isn't a plan.

Have you practised it? Rehearsal is what turns a good intention into an automatic response.

Without these, a well-stocked cupboard just delays the panic by a few days.

What Real Preparedness Looks Like

We built our Emergency Preparedness and Response (EPRR) course around this exact gap, because government stockpiling advice will always stop at the "what to buy" stage. Training has to go further.

The course covers seven practical areas:

Preparing your home and household for realistic, local risks
Deciding when to shelter in place and when to evacuate
Building and maintaining a proper 72-hour emergency kit
Creating a household emergency plan that people actually follow
Practising responses so they become familiar rather than stressful
Planning for recovery once the immediate danger has passed
Applying all of this without slipping into fear or extreme, unrealistic scenarios

This isn't theory. It's built by instructors with UK special forces and RaSP-trained backgrounds, the same people who train professionals to make these calls in genuinely hostile environments. The difference for a household is scale, not substance. The decision-making process is identical.

A Note From the Ground

We've spent years training people to stay calm and make good decisions when everything around them is going wrong. The households that cope best in a real incident are never the ones with the biggest cupboard. They're the ones who talked it through beforehand, agreed who does what, and practised it once so it wasn't a surprise on the day.

That's the piece a government leaflet can never give you.

What to Do Before the Campaign Even Launches

The Cabinet Office guidance hasn't landed yet, but you don't need to wait for it. Start with three things this week:

Map your household's real risks — weather, power, water, and location-specific threats.
Write down who calls whom if mobiles or the internet go down.
Agree your shelter-or-evacuate triggers before you're standing in the middle of deciding.

Then build the habit properly. The Emergency Preparedness and Response course takes you through all seven modules, from the first risk assessment to what recovery looks like once the incident is over. Full bundle is £175, with single modules available from £45.

The government is right that resilience starts at home. The question is whether your household is actually ready, or just stocked.

What's the one gap in your own household's emergency plan? We'd genuinely like to hear it in the comments.

Source: The Guardian — "UK to warn citizens to stock up on food amid threat from climate crisis and hostile states," 25 August 2026; European Commission 72-hour preparedness campaign, March 2025.

🕵️ Resource Spotlight: Surveillance Self-Defense

Produced by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, this is a clear, practical guide to protecting your privacy and digital security, built originally for journalists and activists, but genuinely useful for anyone worried about doxxing, tracking, or unwanted digital exposure.

If you're in a public-facing role, or just want to tighten up your own digital hygiene, it's a solid place to start.

🔗 https://ssd.eff.org/

❓ Have you ever had to actively manage your digital footprint because of your work?

Surveillance Self-Defense We’re the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a member-supported non-profit working to protect online privacy for over thirty-five years. This is Surveillance Self-Defense: our expert guide to protecting you and your friends from online spying. Read the BASICS to find out how online surveillance works...