You don't have to be a doomsday prepper to plan for a crisis

Even a prolonged power cut can test a household's resilience.

- Lara Williams

If you are looking for lessons on how to be prepared for a crisis, you could do worse than to watch 28 Days Later, the 2002 cult zombie thriller, or its 2007 sequel 28 Weeks Later (a third installment is scheduled for later in June). Here are my movie notes:

• Wind-up radios are essential;

• Ensuring you have enough water will be the biggest challenge;

• Long-life food that doesn't need cooking is your friend; and

• Maintaining a social distance from the infected is prudent.

The characters in 28 Days Later are, of course, battling a society-ending viral epidemic of the undead, which is unlikely. But that doesn't mean the lessons aren't pertinent.

The act of readying for a crisis—known as "prepping"—has often been seen as a pastime purely of the paranoid—including by me. The series Doomsday Preppers on the National Geographic channel shows Americans spending millions of dollars on elaborate bunkers and toilet paper and looks much more like fly-on-the-wall entertainment than instructive television.

But I've recently changed my view: In our increasingly volatile world, where climate change intensifies the likelihood and severity of extreme weather, and geopolitics is running hot, taking steps to improve your household's resilience is common sense.

Consider the Swiss village of Blatten, which was tragically wiped off the map by a collapsing glacier at the end of May. A US$7 million (S$9 million) bio-fortress would have been laughably useless, but a bug-out bag—a prepper term for an emergency grab-and-go collection of essentials—would have been useful, if only to make the May 19 evacuation smoother.

Meanwhile, recent blackouts in Spain and Portugal interrupted power for at least 10 hours and led to widespread chaos, including a scramble for essential supplies such as tinned food and power banks. Having those basics at hand would make the situation less stressful.