Towards proactive disaster risk management: Benefits and challenges in linking early warning with risk financing

October 28, 2020 4:35 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

Towards proactive disaster risk management: Benefits and challenges in linking early warning with risk financing

Organizer: InsuResilience Secretariat / Anticipation Hub (German Red Cross, IFRC, Climate Centre)

Acting in anticipation or early after a disaster can save lives and livelihoods, protect public finances and safeguard development gains. For early warning systems to inform governments and humanitarian actors about oncoming climate impacts and trigger effective anticipatory and response measures, they need to be underpinned by funding through pre-arranged risk finance, such as insurance instruments and forecast-based financing. However, working across various systems, technologies and institutions can be challenging, especially when data availability and quality are poor and institutional capacity is low. This side event will provide opportunities for learning on comprehensive approaches to prepared-ness, engaging a diverse community of stakeholders to explore how early warning systems can be used to shift risk financing to an even earlier, anticipatory stage, and help decision-makers become proactive risk managers. It will showcase innovative examples that demonstrate how early warning combined with risk financing has triggered anticipatory action, which thereby mitigates disaster impacts.The workshop will explore how risk finance instruments could build on these systems to deliver anticipatory funding, and how to overcome gaps between data providers (early warning systems) and data consumers (cost-effective risk finance arrangements) to deliver early action and timely response. Previous dialogue under the InsuResilience Global Partnership on the synergies between early warning and risk financing has suggested that regular roundtables between early warning experts, risk finance practitioners, humanitarian organizations and country representatives could help address challenges, promote innovation towards integrated approaches, and strengthen early action capacity across vulnerable regions. Building on the lessons captured in this dialogue, this event will facilitate an in-depth discussion on tackling the challenges around linking risk finance to early warning systems, including data and modelling, transparency in risk analysis and human impact-focused forecasting to anticipate disasters, reduce risk and build resilience.

Speakers:
John Harding, Head of CREWS Secretariat
Toby Behrmann, Partnerships & Innovation Lead at Global Parametrics
Clare Harris, Technical Lead for Crisis Anticipation and Risk Financing, Start Network
Irene Amuron, Technical Advisor, Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre
Afroza Haque , Senior Project Officer, German Red Cross Bangladesh
Kara Siahaan, Early Action and Disaster Risk Financing Coordinator
Daniel Stadtmüller, Senior Policy Advisor and Team Lead, InsuResilience Secretariat
Eduardo Anthony G. Mariño, Director of the Asset Management Service, Philippines’ Bureau of the Treasury

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Building Urban Resilience in Southern Africa: Dialogue of Mayors and City Leaders

October 28, 2020 4:33 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

Building Urban Resilience in Southern Africa: Dialogue of Mayors and City Leaders

Organizer: World Bank, SADC, DIMSUR

The session will be an opportunity for city leaders, government representatives and DRR practitioners from across Southern Africa to come together and:
– Present the Regional Assessment of urban vulnerability and resilience in Southern Africa.
– Share experiences and best practices on climate change adaptation, DRR and building urban resilience between cities in the region and discuss opportunities for knowledge exchange and collaboration.
– Consider existing regional strategies and frameworks and discuss gaps, linkages and implementation mechanisms in the context of formulating recommendations for a regional framework on urban resilience.
– Reflect on the changing DRR landscape in Africa in light of the dual challenges of climate change and the wide-ranging impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. The starting point for the discussion will be the findings of the Regional Assessment on Urban Vulnerability and Resilience in the SADC Countries and a summary of the outcomes and lessons learned from the implementations of CityRAP in six countries. The session highlights the findings from the Building Disaster Resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa Program and the collaboration between World Bank, DIMSUR/UNHABITAT, SADC and other partners in the region.

Speakers:
Fruzsina Straus, Human Settlements Officer, UN-Habitat
Mhoudine Sitti Farouata, Governor of Grande Comore Island, Union of Comoros
Joshua Maligwa, Town Clerk City of Mutare, Zimbabwe
Alice Russo, Mayor of Matsapha, Eswatini
António Beleza, Director, INGC, Mozambique
James Chiusiwa, Commissioner for Disaster Management Affairs, Department of Disaster Management Affairs, Malawi
Dewald van Niekerk, Professor, North-West University, South Africa

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How to construct an inclusive city weather and early warning system

October 28, 2020 4:31 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

How to construct an inclusive city weather and early warning system

Organizer: Resurgence

How would you go about creating a forecasting and early warning system in which the principles of inclusivity and co-design are applied to the absolute maximum? Resurgence has been applying a range of approaches and tools under an umbrella service, a community weather forecasting and early warning co-design service, for cities, called DARAJA. DARAJA enables key city actors to co-design city level weather forecasts, emergency warnings and build together communications systems and initiatives with dynamic feedback loops back into the national weather agency. The Understanding the Anatomy of DARAJA Workshop will allow participants to deconstruct a weather and climate services project supported by the Met Office and EIT Climate-KIC that won an innovation award from the Global Resilience Partnership (GRP). Understanding the Anatomy of DARAJA will involve two key activities: (1) A persona-based exercise using the example of an urban water vendor, a cleaning lady and a rapid bus transit system manager (2) An information mapping exercise that will feature Resurgence’ s information ecosystems mapping tool applied last year with the World Bank GFDRR in Chiang Mai at the Urban Risk Lab. This workshop is suited to meteorologists, extreme weather forecasters, disaster risk managers, community development experts, risk communicators and insurers. The learning outcomes of the workshop will be a working proficiency in the key conceptual and operational principles of ensuring that weather forecasting and early warning services meet the needs of the 1 billion urban poor residents in Asia and other global regions. Find out how this workshop can help you fully utilise data to generate real world action for climate resilience.

Speakers:
Sunayana Sen, Project Manager – DARAJA
Mark Harvey, CEO
Amy Willox, Programme Advisor

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We need champions to understand disaster risk

October 28, 2020 4:30 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

We need champions to understand disaster risk

Organizer: GEO-Geohazard Supersites and Natural Laboratories initiative GEO-GSNL; Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia – INGV, Centro Internazionale in Monitoraggio Ambientale – CIMA, Goma Volcano Observatory, Iceland Civil Protection, United Nations University – Institute for Environment and Human Security – UNU-EHS / Eurac Research

In this event we aim to show how scientific collaboration and investments in innovation and research are fundamental to understand Disaster Risk and thus are essential components of Disaster Risk Reduction and Management.
Risk “champions” are successful projects or initiatives which bring innovation and collaboration into the process of risk understanding. We will discuss their experiences and show the difference they have made, often using a bottom up approach.
The first part of the event includes ignite presentations of risk “champions”, showing innovation in different sectors and case studies as:
– How regional collaboration can be organized for the provision of “standardized” situational awareness information to institutional users ( the ARISTOTLE project experience)
– How technological and process innovation can lead to better flood protection and can open the market to new risk financing products (the CIMA EDRIFT project in Myanmar)
– How global collaboration and open science can support hazard and risk assessment in the second poorest country in the world (the Goma Volcano Observatory experience)
– How a government can exploit state of the art scientific information in disaster response (the Iceland Civil Protection experience)
– How dynamic exposure evaluation of populations, taking into consideration movements of people during the day / night / weekend / seasons, can improve the risk assessment (UNU-EHS / Eurac Research)

The second part of the event is a discussion with the audience aiming to inspire new ideas and stimulate new approaches to risk reduction. 

Speakers:
Stefano Salvi, Technological Director
Alberto Michelini, Research Director
Roberto Rudari, Research Director
Charles Balagizi, Geochemist and Geohazards Researcher
Sara Barsotti, Coordinator for Volcanic Hazards
Stefano Schneiderbauer, Head of GLOMOS Bolzano Office

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What is a flood? Risk perceptions and decisions

October 28, 2020 4:28 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

What is a flood? Risk perceptions and decisions

Organizer: World Bank (Urban Floods Community of Practice), NUS Lloyd’s Register Foundation Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk, NUS Deltares

This session seeks to examine flood risk perception and its implications for decisions on prevention and preparedness. Flood risk perception is the assessment of the probability of hazard and the probability of results perceived by society and is a key aspect of flood risk management. The effective communication of risk is a precursor to improvements in risk data collection and analysis, and subsequent investment decisions. However, risk perception is an intervening factor between risk communication and risk mitigation actions at the community level. Decision-makers need to take risk perceptions into account to develop risk communication strategies to avoid underestimation of risk. Risk perception is also an important factor in risk-based planning and the prioritization of flood resilience measures, influencing the options available for flood risk management, such as insurance. Encouraging participatory decision-making can enable decision-makers to assess the acceptable level of risk that populations can bear and corresponding flood risk management interventions. Yet flood risk perceptions are subjective and varying. There are many stakeholders involved, each of whom may have a different interest, perception of risk, cultural attitude toward risk, language or vocabulary, and scientific literacy. For example, what are considered serious floods in a country or community with a low risk tolerance may be considered as mild inundation or temporary water logging in another. Within a country, rural and urban communities may also have different perceptions of the same event. This session therefore aims to explore the nuances in judgment of risk and trace their implications for flood risk management. It will discuss how decision-makers can take risk perception into account under conditions of uncertainty, assessing the acceptable level of risk for populations to bear. The technical session will explore the following issues: the importance of flood risk perceptions in flood risk management; current attitudes and differing levels of tolerance to risk; challenges in identifying flood risk perceptions; assumptions underlying different risk perceptions; factors that influence risk perception; risk tolerance under climate uncertainty; risk communication and risk management strategies in light of risk perceptions.

Speakers:
Olivia Jensen, Lead Scientist, Lloyd’s Register Foundation Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk at the National University of Singapore
Abdul Malik Sadat Idris, Director, Water Resources and Irrigation, BAPPENAS, Government of Indonesia
Alex Pui, Head National Catastrophe and Sustainable (APAC) at Swiss Re, and Adjunct Lecturer, University of New South Wales
JanJaap Brinkman, Director of Singapore Operations, Deltares
Robert Wasson, Emeritus Professor, Australian National University

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Breaking the silos: From single to comprehensive multi-hazard risk frameworks

October 28, 2020 4:26 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

Breaking the silos: From single to comprehensive multi-hazard risk frameworks

Organizer: Institute for Environmental Studies, VU University Amsterdam; Philippines Red Cross, German Red Cross and 510, an initiative of the Netherlands Red Cross; Deltares; Marsh & McLennan Advantage, Singapore; UN MGCY

The conventional multi-hazard framework is still characterized by hazard-silo thinking. This causes disaster risk reduction to be seen through the lens of one single hazard, neglecting interactions with other potential hazards and dynamic vulnerabilities. In the worst case, such an approach can lead to the unfortunate realization that while decreasing the risk of one hazard, it increases the risk of another, more generally referred to as the ‘asynergies’ of DRR measures. Recent high-level agendas (GP2019, GCA2019) are therefore urging to move away from the single-hazard silo thinking and are calling for the implementation of coherent multi-hazard risk frameworks. In this serious game, we aim to break these silos in a playful but serious and collaborative effort. We will leverage the diversity and expertise of the UR community by forming multi-disciplinary groups, thereby re-creating a microcosm of some of the possible challenges faced when developing multi-hazard preparedness strategies. Each team will analyse different multi-hazard scenarios based on hazard types already observed such as cyclones Idai and Kenneth hitting the African east coast only two weeks apart and the 2018 Sulawesi earthquake that set off a chain of events.

Speakers:
Damien Riquet, Project manager at the German Red Cross in the Philippines
Annisa Triyanti, Postdoctoral researcher at the University Utrecht, The Netherlands
Brenden Jongman, Disaster Risk Management specialist at the World Bank

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Biodiversity loss is an underestimated risk: climate, development and business perspectives

October 28, 2020 4:24 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

Biodiversity loss is an underestimated risk: climate, development and business perspectives

Organizer: IIED *this session is part of the Development & Climate Days

This session is part of the Development & Climate Days.Biodiversity is essential for human life, yet we are losing biodiversity at unprecedented rates. This presents as much risk to our economy, society and environment as climate change does, but there is still much confusion and misperception about biodiversity – what it is, what it does, and why it matters. Biodiversity underpins nature’s ability to support a healthy environment. It directly supports export earnings, gross domestic product, and jobs in a wide variety of economic sectors from tourism to agriculture. Biodiversity has a direct impact on the livelihoods and income for billions of people, yet it is underestimated in its value.The impacts of biodiversity loss are severe, and stretch far beyond the direct loss of fluffy mammals and colourful plants. Biodiversity loss is contributing to food insecurity, exacerbating climate change, destabilising communities and affecting human health. Further, biodiversity loss disproportionately affects poor and vulnerable communities, many of which are already struggling to cope with the climate crisis. The true risks of biodiversity loss, including to achieving climate and development goals and ensuring business sustainability, are not well known. This event will bring together expert speakers from climate, development and business backgrounds to discuss why biodiversity matters and outline how biodiversity loss is a critical and underestimated risk.

Speakers:
Joanna Elliot, Senior Conservation Director, Cross-cutting Programmes, Fauna & Flora International
Dilys Roe, Principal Researcher and Team Leader, Natural Resources, International Institute for Environment and Development
Natalie Seddon, Professor of Biodiversity at the University of Oxford and Director of the Nature-based Solutions Initiative
Liz Rogers, Vice President, Environmental Technology, BP International

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Social Protection for addressing Climate Risks: What are the Linkages?

October 28, 2020 4:22 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

Social Protection for addressing Climate Risks: What are the Linkages?

Organizer: Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre

Social protection (SP) has been proposed as a policy instrument of direct relevance to deal with emerging climate-related risks and vulnerabilities. This session will explore what is the current state of evidence in using SP for managing climate risks, and critically discuss its role in the role in the long term. The session will involve brief talks, discussions, break out groups and cartoon annotations. The objective of the session is to leave the audience with an understanding of the different aspects to keep in mind when considering SP for climate related risks.

Speakers:
Cecilia Costella, Senior Technical Advisor, Social Protection, Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre; PhD Candidate, Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente
Dominic Sett, Project Associate, United Nations University – Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS), Bonn

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Are present-day infrastructure disaster risk models still applicable in a post Covid-19 world?

October 28, 2020 4:20 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

Are present-day infrastructure disaster risk models still applicable in a post Covid-19 world?

Organizer: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Lloyds Register Foundation, Resilience Shift, University of Oxford

Critical infrastructure systems, such as energy, transportation, water, waste, and digital communications, are the backbone of modern economies and societies. Failures of these systems can result in large-scale economic losses and social disruptions. As presented last year in the World Bank Lifelines report, the direct damages from natural hazards to power generation and transport alone cost $18 billion a year, cutting into the already scarce budget of road agencies and power utilities. But the main impact of natural shocks on infrastructure is through the disruptions they impose on people and communities, for instance, businesses unable to keep factories running or use the internet to take orders and process payments; or on the households that don’t have the water they need to prepare meals or on people unable to go to work, send children to school, or get to a hospital. To quantify these impacts, many data and models have been developed over the past years for critical infrastructure risks assessment at the level of local, national, and even global scales. Models look both at infrastructure assets individually and at the networks within they exist. They have been applied to assess both damage and risks, but also to help in long-term planning for infrastructure investment and adaptation. However, there are important lessons from Covid-19 related to long term infrastructure investments, in particular in relation to the complexity and uncertainty of global dynamics. What have we learnt are the limitations of our models? What is the future for risk models following this large scale crisis? In this session, we’ll discuss whether developed infrastructure risk models are still fit-for-purpose and whether we can use them to further “mainstream” resilience action? And how do we turn these (often academic) risk-based models into useful tools for practitioners and decision makers?

Speakers:
Raghav Pant, Senior Research Associate
Juliet Mian, Deputy Executive Director, The Resilience Shift
Dr Scott Thacker, Infrastructure Specialist

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An Interdisciplinary Approach to Forecasting and Early Warning Systems: A Role Paying Game

October 28, 2020 4:19 pm Published by Leave a comment

  

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Forecasting and Early Warning Systems: A Role Paying Game

Organizer: Water Youth Network
Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), Center of Applied Research in Hydrometeorology (CRAHI)
University of Reading

Forecasting and Early Warning Systems (EWSs) help societies prepare for and respond to all types of disasters, including those due to hydro-meteorological hazards. In recent years, there has been a consensus on the need for an interdisciplinary approach to forecasting, and communicating warnings and their inherent uncertainties. The integration of methods and knowledge such as risk, probabilistic and risk-based forecast, impact-based assessments, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) fields, social science and local knowledge can (1) improve the quality of forecast, (2) improve decision making and (3) support better communication of warnings and response. However, one of the biggest challenges is the need to collaborate across relevant disciplines. Therefore new ways of thinking are required on the necessary skills and tools to facilitate more collaborative work. This session aims to highlight the benefits and skills required for an interdisciplinary approach in EWS in the form of a role-playing game. Participants will also have the opportunity to understand more about the role of diverse disciplines and the importance of collaborating in EWS in providing a solution. The game will be based on a hypothetical emergency situation, in which participants will be required to make different decisions. After the game, an active discussion with all participants will be carried out to propose take away action points on how to improve interdisciplinarity in EWS and how young professionals can contribute to promoting this approach.

Speakers:
Adele Young, PhD Fellow
Erika Melendez, PhD Candidate
Nikolaos Mastrantonas, Early Career Researcher / PhD Candidate
Santiago Gómez, PhD researcher
Linda Speight, Hydrometeorologist

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