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PurposeThis paper aims to examine how government continuity planning contributes to strengthening the public sector's emergency preparedness, resulting in enhanced resilience of the public sector. Government continuity plans (GCPs) are a recently focused concept in disaster preparedness, compared to business continuity plans (BCPs) in the private sector. The need for BCPs was widely recognized after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake (GEJE) and the 2011 Thailand Floods. However, recent disasters, such as the 2016 Kumamoto Earthquake in Japan, have revealed that local governments without effective GCPs were severely affected by disasters, preventing them from quickly responding to or recovering from disasters. When the GEJE occurred in 2011, only 11% of municipal governments in Japan had GCPs.Design/methodology/approachThe paper analyzes basic principles of government continuity planning using complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory while summarizing recent developments in theory and practice of government continuity planning.FindingsThis research investigates the Japanese experience of GCPs using self-organization, one of the concepts of CAS. A GCP will complement regional disaster plans, which often focus on what governments should do to protect citizens during emergencies but fail to outline how governments should prepare for an emergency operation. The study concludes that GCPs contribute to increased resilience among the public sector in terms of robustness, redundancy, resourcefulness and rapidity.Practical implicationsThis paper includes implications for the development and improvement of a GCP's operational guideline.Originality/valueThis research fulfills an identified need to investigate the effectiveness of a GCP for resilience in the public sector and how to improve its operation using concepts of CAS.

Abstract. Mass livestock mortality events during severe winters, a phenomenon that Mongolians call dzud, cause the country significant socioeconomic problems. Dzud is an example of a compound event, meaning that multiple climatic and social drivers contribute to the risk of occurrence. Existing studies argue that the frequency and intensity of dzud events are rising due to the combined effects of climate change and variability, most notably summer drought and severe winter conditions, on top of socioeconomic dynamics such as overgrazing. Summer droughts are a precondition for dzud because scarce grasses cause malnutrition, making livestock more vulnerable to harsh winter conditions. However, studies investigating the association between climate and dzud typically look at a short time frame (i.e., after 1940), and few have investigated the risk or the recurrence of dzud over a century-scale climate record. This study aims to fill the gaps in technical knowledge about the recurrence probability of dzud by estimating the return
periods of relevant climatic variables: summer drought conditions and winter minimum temperature. We divide the country into three regions (northwest, southwest, and east Mongolia) based on the mortality index at the soum (county) level. For droughts, our study uses as a proxy the tree-ring-reconstructed Palmer drought severity index (PDSI) for three regions between 1700–2013. For winter severity, our study uses observational data of winter minimum temperature after 1901 while inferring winter minimum temperature in Mongolia from instrumental data in Siberia that extend to the early 19th century. Using a generalized extreme value distribution with time-varying parameters, we find that the return periods of drought conditions vary over time, with variability increasing for all the regions. Winter temperature severity, however, does not change with time. The median temperature of the 100-year return period for winter minimum temperature in Mongolia over the past 300 years is estimated as −26.08 ∘C for the southwest, −27.99 ∘C for the northwest, and −25.31 ∘C for the east. The co-occurrence of summer drought and winter severity increases in all the regions in the early 21st century. The analysis suggests that a continued trend in summer drought would lead to increased vulnerability and malnutrition. Prospects for climate index insurance for livestock are also discussed.