Mar 26, 2014 | Energy & Climate, Risk and resilience
By Reinhard Mechler, IIASA Risk, Policy, and Vulnerability Program
On March 25, member countries of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) started discussing the key findings of the second volume of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) in Yokohama, Japan. The report focuses on climate-related impacts, risks and adaptation. Once approved by the 150+ governments present, together with IPCC’s other two parts of the report on physical climate science and mitigating greenhouse gases, it will constitute the scientific backbone for informing national and international climate policy over the coming years.
Flooded marketplace in Jakarta. Credit: Charles Wiriawan/Flickr (Creative Commons License)
A key aspect in climate adaptation is dealing with extreme events including natural disasters. It has become clear that extreme event risk constitutes a large part of the adaptation problem, particularly for developing countries and communities.
Despite this growing awareness, the international adaptation policy process is moving forward only slowly. Specifically, there is need for concrete advice for the Loss and Damage Mechanism, the main vehicle under the Climate Convention for dealing with climate-related impacts, which was agreed in Warsaw at the last Conference of the Parties in late 2013
In our commentary, published today in Nature Climate Change with colleagues from LSE, IVM and Deltares, we suggest that better understanding climate-related disaster risk and risk management can inform effective action on climate adaptation and point a way forward for policy and practice.
A key to moving forward is an actionable concept of risk. This involves identifying efficient and acceptable interventions based on recurrency of hazards—a concept known as risk layering. For example, for flood risk, this could mean identifying physical flood protection to deal with more frequent events, considering risk financing for infrequent disasters as well as relying on public and international compensation for extreme catastrophes. Risk layering overall points towards considering risk comprehensively as determined by climatic and non-climatic factors as well as considering portfolios of options that manage risks today and in the future.
The concept of risk layering underlies many areas of risk policy and management in agriculture, finance and insurance. It has been applied for disaster risks, mostly for insurance options, but not informed thinking on comprehensive risk management portfolios. Such broad understanding of risk management can also be helpful in identifying risks that are beyond adaptation–meriting international support, such as from the Green Climate Fund.
Climate risk management has now moved beyond theory. As one example, the megacity of Jakarta currently is setting up a multi-billion dollar program to manage increasing risk from sea level rise with large levees. This effort is integrated with a concern for managing flood risk and land subsidence, which are shaped by non-climatic factors, such as unplanned urbanization. The effort, therefore, involves options to implement acceptable building and zoning regulations for reducing exposure and vulnerability of houses and infrastructure to flooding.
Many policy-and implementation-specific questions remain. Over the coming months, IIASA researchers and our network will take the agenda on climate risk management forward with a focus on informing policy as well as providing actionable information on the ground.
Reference
Reinhard Mechler, Laurens M. Bouwer, Joanne Linnerooth-Bayer, Stefan Hochrainer-Stigler, Jeroen C. J. H. Aerts, Swenja Surminski & Keith Williges. 2014. Managing unnatural disaster risk from climate extremes. Nature Climate Change. March 26, 2014. http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n4/full/nclimate2137.html
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Feb 19, 2014 | Risk and resilience
By Junko Mochizuki, Adriana Keating and Reinhard Mechler, IIASA Risk, Policy, and Vulnerability Program
Flood in Davao City, Philippines, January 20, 2013. Photo credit: Jeff Pioquinto via Flickr
The year 2015 will mark a crucial milestone for the international development, climate change, and disaster management communities. Negotiations are currently underway to hammer out three landmark decisions: a much anticipated global climate deal to be agreed at the COP21 meeting in Paris, a new agreement on post-Millenium Development Goals known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the post-Hyogo disaster risk reduction framework (HFA2) to be adopted at the 2015 World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai. The outcomes of these three international forums will largely shape the global agendas for the next few decades.
The HFA2 builds on the knowledge and experience gained from 10 years of implementation of the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) 2005-2015, the first international initiative to offer a global blueprint for disaster risk reduction. Since its inception, 22 core indicators have been developed to monitor global progress across five priority areas, including building a culture of safety and enhancing national and local institutional architecture. The implementation has thus far shown mixed progress. The key remaining issue is the underlying drivers of risk and that the HF2 must address both the correction of existing risk and prevention of future risk creation.
On 10 and 11 February, the world’s leading experts on disaster risk management gathered at IIASA to begin designing an effective HFA2 monitoring system. At the meeting, co-organized with the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), participants deliberated how the HFA2 monitoring system could address the remaining issues of risk creation, mainstreaming, and resilience building, and inform ongoing discussions on SDGs and climate change mitigation and adaptation.
The meeting participants emphasized that the notion of resilience to natural disasters or other unexpected events offers a unique entry point for shared discussions across the development, disaster, and climate change research and policy communities. The resilience notion of “bouncing-forward” stresses that societies must understand the risks they face, and be prepared use both pre- and post-disaster opportunities to implement policies that can reduce risk and advance development objectives. These are important additions to the disaster risk management debate which are essential to the post-2015 approach.
But many challenges remain. We need a concrete set of indicators to measure the multi-dimensional concept of disaster resilience. While we expect to see the adoption of quantitative disaster risk reduction targets—such as mortality, affected population, or economic loss reduction, we do not yet have a globally agreed methodology to measure disaster loss and damage. More fundamentally, an emphasis on loss data could send the world a wrong signal that disaster loss is all that matters. This speaks contrary to IIASA’s ongoing research. What we have found time and time again is that what matters most is a country’s steady management of underlying risk and resilience, whether or not a disaster has occurred.
As negotiations continue towards the climate, development, and disaster goals, it is clear that effective framework must be organized around a holistic understanding of well being and its systemic components. Over the coming months, researchers and analysts including IIASA staff will work with UNISDR to develop a global framework linking the concepts of risk and resilience.
About the authors
Junko Mochizuki and Adriana Keating are research scholars and Reinhard Mechler is the deputy program leader in IIASA’s Risk, Policy, and Vulnerability Program. Their current work at IIASA focuses on advancing the notion of disaster resilience, evaluating how novel and participatory system analysis tools may be used to inform policy on disaster resilience building.
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Jan 28, 2014 | Risk and resilience
Interview with IIASA risk expert Nadejda Komendantova
In a new study, IIASA Risk, Policy, and Vulnerability Program researcher Nadejda Komendantova and colleagues from Germany and Switzerland examined how natural hazards and risks assessments can be incorporated into decision-making processes in Europe on mitigation of multiple risks.
A cyclist rides along the flooded Danube River in Braila, Romania, in 2010. Credit: cod_gabriel on Flickr
Why did you decide to conduct this study?
European decision makers currently have a number of methods that they can use to assess natural hazards and risks and apply to the decision-making process. These methods include risk and hazard assessments, probabilistic scenarios, and socio-economic and engineering models. The variety of tools is enormous and volume of knowledge and data is growing. However, the process of communication between science and practice leaves a lot of open questions for research.
Researchers have developed a few tools to provide multiple risk assessment of a given territory. But even though these models have been tested by operational and practicing stakeholders, there is limited information about how useful the models are for civil protection stakeholders to use in practice. In order to communicate results from science to practice and make it possible for decision-makers to use such tools, it helps to involve decision-makers in the development process. Participatory modeling, which is an important part of risk governance, allows us to not only to take into consideration the facts, but also values and judgments that decision-makers bring to their actions.
What questions did you aim to answer in your study?
The decision-making process becomes even more complex when we talk about situations with multiple risks – multi-risks – which involve interactions between several risks. How will decision-maker will prioritize their actions on risk mitigation or on resources allocation when facing not single but multiple risks? We also wanted to find out if the tools developed by science such as decision support models could be suitable for these tasks. Another question is if there are differences in perceptions of the usability of decision-support tools between different stakeholders, such as academia (based on more theoretical considerations) and civil protection (based on practice).
What are the multiple risks or hazards that face Europe?
Across Europe, people suffer losses not just from single hazards, but also from multiple events in combination. The most important hazards for Europe are earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, wildfires, winter storms, and floods along both rivers and coastlines.
What methods did you use to conduct your study?
To answer our research questions we collected feedback from civil protection stakeholders on existing risk and hazard assessment tools as well as on the generic multi-risk framework to understand interrelations between different risks, such as conjoint and cascade effects. The new study was based on a method developed by Arnaud Mignan at ETH Zürich, with a decision-support tool developed by Bijan Khazai at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Through a participatory approach, the decision-support tool allowed stakeholders to assign relative importance to the losses for different sectors for each of the scenarios likely to occur in the region.
We collected data through questionnaires on existing risk assessment tools in Europe and their implementation. Then, using the new framework, we conducted focus group discussions in Bonn and Lisbon, and decision-making experiments applying the developed tools. Afterwards we had a chance to collect feedback from stakeholders.
What did you find?
The study showed that general standards for multi-risk assessment are still missing—there are different terminologies and different methodologies related to data collection, monitoring, and output. According to stakeholders from practice, this variety of data, assessment methods, tools and terminology might be a barrier for implementation of the multi-risk approach.
The study also found a sharp divide in understanding of the usability of the tools and areas for their application. Academic stakeholders saw the risk-assessment tools as being useful to understand loss and communication of multi-risk parameters. The stakeholders from practice instead saw the tool as more useful for training and educational purposes as well as to raise awareness about possible multi-risk scenarios.
What should be done to help decision-makers make better decisions?
The study made it clear that we need to work on training and education, both for policymakers and the public. The models we have developed could be useful for educating stakeholders about the usefulness of a multi-risk approach, and to disseminate these results to the general public. It was recommended to use the tools during special training workshops organized for decision-makers on multi-risk mitigation to see possible consequences of a multi-hazard situation for their region. Participatory modeling, involving cooperation between scientists and decision-makers from practice, could not only improve communication processes between science and policy. In addition, decision-support models can become a part of dialogue to help to avoid judgment biases and systematic errors in decision-making and to help in complex decision-making process grounded on human rationality and judgment biases.
Reference:
Nadejda Komendantova, Roger Mrzyglocki, Arnaud Mignan, Bijan Khazai, Friedemann Wenzel, Anthony Patt, Kevin Fleming. 2014. Multi-hazard and multi-risk decision support tools as a part of participatory risk governance: Feedback from civil protection stakeholder. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221242091300068X
Note: This article gives the views of the interviewee, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
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