Disaster Resilience A National Imperative (2012) / Chapter Skim
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3 Making the Case for Resilience Investments: The Scope of the Challenge
3 Making the Case for Resilience Investments: The Scope of the Challenge
Pages 67-90
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From page 67... ...
Owners of community assets are primarily responsible for their own resilience investments, yet community leaders from both the public and private sectors recognize that community assets are interconnected and interdependent and that holistic planning, programming, investing, and execution create common and interrelated resilience benefits for the community. Realizing the maximum benefits requires close collaboration among public- and private-sector leaders aided by a shared approach and commitment to investment.
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From page 68... ...
Resilience investments challenge traditional approaches to "costbenefit" analysis because communities have many different kinds of assets which are valued differently. Communities have very-high-value assets that are "essential" to keep operating -- for example, hospitals, power plants, water and sewage plants, and transportation and communication networks -- that usually have a tangible dollar value attached to them, and the costs of disruptions in these services can usually be directly calculated.
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From page 69... ...
Thus the total value of a community's assets -- both the high-value structural assets and those with high social, cultural, and/or environmental value -- necessitates qualitative and quantitative inputs into a decision-making framework for disaster resilience. Such decision making is going to be difficult for community leaders as they try to address the value of multiple community assets in economic, social, cultural, and environmental terms.
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From page 70... ...
. Decisions about the prioritization and the level of investment require consideration of both quantitative data and qualitative value assessments BOX 3.1 Decentralization of Community Assets: One Means to Forge a Greater Sense of Community Resilience Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the public school system in New Orleans was centralized, and the schools were operated largely through a unified school district and primarily served one community function -- to educate the city's children.
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From page 71... ...
a purposive sample of communities with mitigation grants funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to determine losses avoided through reductions in direct property damage, business interruptions, nonmarket damages, human losses, and costs of emergency response; (2)
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From page 72... ...
has demonstrated that using ring-shank nails with full round heads instead of smooth-shank nails or staples to hold siding and roofing materials on a home contributes to significantly more resilient structures when the homes are subjected to strong weather events such as hurricanes and wind storms. IBHS has a stronger, safer construction standard for new homes, known as FORTIFIED for Safer Living®, which goes above building codes (where they exist)
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From page 73... ...
In addition, the geographic patterns of disaster losses -- human fatalities, property losses, and crop losses -- illustrate where the impacts are the greatest, and where there could be challenges in responding to and recovering from disasters. Geographic patterns of losses, when compared with available data on housing, population growth, income level, and types of natural hazards, allow understanding of some of the driving factors of exposure and vulnerability to hazards and disasters (see also Chapter 2)
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From page 74... ...
, changes in asset values, changes in reporting, changes in housing stock, improved awareness, or some combination of these. When national losses are normalized for population and wealth, upward patterns in normalized losses appear to become less significant (Pielke and Landsea, 1998; Brooks and Doswell, 2001; Miller et al., 2008)
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From page 75... ...
and insured business interruption losses, estimated from known insured losses. Because of the differences in loss estimation techniques, thresholds for inclusion in the database (large versus small events; insured versus uninsured losses)
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From page 76... ...
, compiled from existing federal data sources, is the closest approximation to a U.S. national inventory of direct disaster losses from natural hazards, but it also underestimates the total value of losses because indirect losses and business interruption are not included, for example.
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From page 77... ...
Deaths Munich RE 13.6 197 NCDC Billion Dollar Events 6.8 46 SHELDUS 8.8 266 EM-DAT 9.15 90 a Munich RE = NatCatSERVICE (which includes total property loss, known insured property losses, and estimated insured business interruption losses; NCDC Billion Dollar Events (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/reports/billionz.html#narrative) reported total property and crop loss; SHELDUS = Spatial Hazard Events and Loss Database for the United States, maintained by the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina (http://www.sheldus.org)
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From page 78... ...
The weaknesses of SHELDUS relate to the input data, culled from federal sources. The federal databases were developed for a different purpose; inconsistencies and biases in those data are transferred to SHELDUS.
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From page 79... ...
Although significant, many of these individual events were not severe enough to warrant a presidential disaster declaration; yet over time, such repetitive losses affected the counties' abilities to respond and recover and led to millions of dollars in crop damages. HVRI = Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute.
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From page 80... ...
California in total has about 66 percent of the nation's total annualized loss; the Pacific Northwest together with California encompasses about 77 percent of the nation's annualized earthquake loss.3 The map of normalized AEL (ratio of total loss to millions of dollars of building inventory value) in Figure 3.4b highlights concentrated loss in regions of high seismic hazard outside of the West Coast: the Wasatch Front in Utah and extending north through the Rocky Mountains, as well as sites of historic earthquakes in the central and eastern United States for which there is geological evidence of repeated events over the past several thousand years (New Madrid, Missouri region; Charleston, South Carolina; and along the Saint Lawrence Seaway)
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From page 81... ...
Human Losses and Loss-of-Life Data Whereas national and global economic losses are growing annually, a positive development is that human losses (deaths, injuries, displacements) generally show the opposite tendency, especially in the developed world (Goklany, 2009)
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From page 82... ...
. The declining number of deaths from natural disasters in the United States and the rest of the developed world is mostly the result of improved building codes and construction practices, improved awareness about disaster risk, and more accurate forecasting and warning systems.
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From page 83... ...
A further complication related to disaster fatality statistics is determining the location where the death occurred. A death certificate contains a place to fill in the geographic location of the initial injury (street, county, zip code, etc.)
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From page 84... ...
that growing communities need may require decisions to be made regarding land use and development in undeveloped areas. These undeveloped areas may include areas of natural defenses whose integrity may be important as a mitigation measure against existing natural hazards (see Chapter 2)
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From page 85... ...
What is missing from this narrative is the overlay of the population shifts and residential housing units with consistent national probabilistic hazard maps (such as the USGS National Seismic Hazard Map and the FEMA flood zone maps) and with accurate mapping of both structural and social vulnerability.
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From page 86... ...
However, changing patterns of hazards as well as changes in population and vulnerability affect economic and human loss patterns. Attempts to improve resilience of individual communities and the nation require more consistent hazard and risk assessments supported by consistent and centrally available disaster loss data.
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From page 87... ...
would be an appropriate entity to convene federal and state agencies, private actors, nongovernmental organizations, and the research community to develop strategies and policies in support of these data collection and maintenance goals. Such a data inventory would reconcile and integrate the fragmented federal datasets on disasters and losses; serve as a national data archive for historic hazard events and loss data; assist in the development of better loss metrics; and provide the evidentiary basis for potentially evaluating resilience interventions.
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From page 88... ...
Six fallacies of natural hazards loss data. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 90(6)
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From page 89... ...
In Modeling the Spatial Economic Impacts of Natural Hazards, Y Okuyama and S
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