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Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2011
Revealing Risk, Redefining Development
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1.5 Strengthening risk governance capacities


Governments need to invest in anticipating, reducing and transferring the different levels of extensive, intensive and emerging risks. However, political and economic incentives required for this may be lacking, and risk governance capacities may be inadequate for the task. Contemporary societies need to strengthen their risk governance capacities in order to reduce those risks that can be reduced, transfer those that cannot, and anticipate and prepare for emerging and realistic risks that cannot be easily identified or measured.

Reducing the extensive strata of risk is easier than the intensive strata. Prospective risk management (Lavell and Franco, 1996

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Lavell, A. and Franco, E., eds. 1996. Estado, sociedad y géstion de los desastres en América Latina. En busca del paradigma perdido. Panama, Panama: La Red.
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; Lavell et al., 2003

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Lavell, A., Mansilla, E., Smith, D., Brenes, A., Romano, L., Somarriba, H., Gamarra, L. and Armien, F. 2003. Regional programme for local risk management: Ideas and notions relating to concept and practice. Guatemala, Panamá and Geneva: CEPREDENAC and UNDP.
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) refers to actions that ensure that development does not add new risks to the stock of risk-prone assets. There are many examples. Land use planning can be used to steer urban development away from high-risk areas. Improved and enforced building standards can be used to reduce vulnerability in new construction. Improved water management can reduce drought risk. Ecosystems that mitigate hazards, such as forests, wetlands and mangroves, can be protected.

Corrective risk management refers to removing risks that are already present before they manifest as loss. This may include relocating highly exposed and vulnerable settlements, adapting and upgrading existing facilities such as schools and hospitals, or restoring degraded ecosystems. Prospective and corrective risk management are not mutually exclusive, because risk itself is constantly changing. Houses, infrastructure networks and cities as a whole are processes more than things, and investment is constantly being made in their renewal, renovation, remodelling, and replacement of component parts. Renewing obsolete infrastructure to a higher specification for example, or introducing strengthening structures when remodelling an old building, are corrective and prospective at the same time.

The more intensive risks which may not be practically or cost-effectively reduced, have to be addressed through compensatory risk management. This can include risk transfer mechanisms such as insurance and reinsurance, contingent financing and social protection measures such as conditional transfers and temporary employment programmes. These measures do not reduce risk per se,4  but compensate for loss, avoiding the spill-over of impacts into other areas such as health, education, nutrition and productivity. Disaster management mechanisms at different scales, including early warning systems, preparedness, rapid response and recovery measures, also play key roles in reducing loss of life and injury, and avoiding poverty outcomes.

For many governments faced with known and urgent risks, it may be difficult to justify investment in protecting against future unknowns. However, developing plausible future risk scenarios is the first step in a process of identifying and anticipating what might happen, before then developing strategies to manage them. The 2003 heat wave in Europe which killed more than 14,800 people in France alone (Pirard et al., 2005

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Pirard, P., Vandentorren, S., Pascal, M., Laadi, K., Le Tertre, A., Cassadou, S. and Ledrans, M. 2005. Summary of the mortality impact assessment of the 2003 heat wave in France. Eurosurveillance 10 (7): 153–156.
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), highlighted that even wealthy countries with strong risk governance capacities can find if difficult to deal with unfamiliar hazards which expose vulnerabilities for which they are neither adapted nor prepared. As Box 1.6 highlights, improved awareness of future risks and preparedness could have greatly reduced the impact of the volcanic ash cloud that largely closed down European airspace in April 2010. After the 2003 European heat wave, France put in place a sophisticated early warning system to anticipate the impacts of future weather extremes (Pascal et al., 2006

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Pascal, M., Laaidi, K., Ledrans, M., Baffert, E., Caserio-Schönemann, C., Le Tertre, A., Manach, J., Medina, S., Rudant, J., and Empereur-Bissonnet, P. 2006. France's heat health watch warning system. International Journal of Biometeorology 50 (3): 144–153.
Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00484-005-0003-x.
), which has subsequently served as the model for a regional early warning system (Auld, 2008

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Auld, H. 2008. Disaster risk reduction under current and changing climate conditions. Scientific lecture given to the 15th World Meteorological Congress, Geneva, Switzerland, 7–25 May, 2007. Geneva, Switzerland: World Meteorological Organization.
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Box 1.6 Unexpected or unprepared?

The volcanic ash cloud that affected Europe in April 2010 is estimated to have caused US$521 million in lost GDP in Britain alone, and US$4.7 billion in global GDP (Oxford Economics, 2010

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Oxford Economics. 2010. The economic impacts of air travel restrictions due to volcanic ash. Oxford, UK: Oxford Economics.
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). Although the disaster was called an unprecedented and unexpected event, it was neither. Rather, it illustrates the challenges posed by risks for which governments are not prepared.

Volcanic activity in Iceland comparable to the 2010 Eyjafjallajokull eruption is not unusual, occurring every 20 to 40 years on average (Sammonds et al., 2010

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Sammonds, P., McGuire, B. and Edwards, S. 2010. Volcanic hazard from Iceland. Analysis and implications of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption. London, UK: University College London,  Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction.
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). This volcanic activity becomes a problem for Europe when this coincides with north to north-westerly air movements, which occur only 6 percent of the time. Thus, whereas the ash cloud could be considered unusual, it was far from unprecedented, and not unexpected. In fact, the volcano had been in eruption for four weeks before the ash cloud reached the airspace of the United Kingdom on 15 April, which was more than ample time to have put into effect contingency plans, had these existed. The losses caused were largely due to a failure to anticipate the risks, meaning that stakeholders were taken by surprise.


The catastrophes of Lima-Callao and Lisbon catalysed the scientific study of physical hazards. But, as Manso de Velasco and the Marques of Pombal discovered, being able to invest in risk reduction involves a quite different challenge; that of identifying the political and economic incentives and negotiating trade-offs with other objectives. Although much has changed over the last 250 years, if the objective of the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) is to be achieved, if progress is to be made towards the UN’s Millenium Development Goals, and if adaptation to climate change is possible, that challenge still remains.

Chapters 2 and 4 of this report show that countries that have invested in strengthening their disaster management capacities have witnessed a steady decline in mortality risk, at least with respect to weather-related hazards. However, the arrangements for risk governance in most countries still appear inadequate to address the risks associated with the rapid increase in asset exposure, that particularly in the last decade, has been fuelled by rapid economic growth in many low- and middle-income countries. Although these countries have strengthened their capacities and reduced their vulnerabilities, these improvements have proved largely insufficient.

Fortunately, a new paradigm in disaster risk reduction is starting to emerge, largely driven by innovations in loss accounting and risk assessment, and in the adaption of development planning and investment instruments and in risk governance by those governments that have recognized the importance of investing today for a safer tomorrow. An opportunity to reduce disaster risk now begins to open: learning from, building on, and up-scaling these innovations; revealing risk and redefining development.


4Though, if well designed, they can incorporate incentives for risk reduction and create community assets that reduce vulnerability.
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