An innovative system of risk management indicators sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank will be presented next week at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan.
The conference organized by the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction will take place Jan. 18-22. The meeting will seek to encourage countries to take actions on disaster prevention and mitigation to be able to achieve the U.N. Millennium Development Goals.
One of Latin America’s leading experts on natural disasters, Omar Darío Cardona, will present the system of indicators at a session scheduled to start at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 18, in the Kobe Portopia Hotel’s Kitano Room. Cardona last year won the U.N. Sasakawa Award for Disaster Reduction.
With financial support from the IDB and the Japan Special Fund, Cardona led the group of experts from Latin America and Caribbean universities and research centers that designed a system of indicators that measures the potential impact of natural disasters in individual countries, their vulnerability to catastrophes and their capacity to manage such risks.
Unlike most existing risk indices, the new indicators can be easily interpreted by a wide range of decision-makers in different fields, rather than only by experts. The system, which draws on two decades of data from 12 nations* in Latin America and the Caribbean, also allows for comparisons between countries and their evolution over time.
Based on composite indicators, the system consists of four major measures:
* The Disaster Deficit Index gauges from a macroeconomic and financial standpoint the risks countries face due to possible catastrophes.
* The Local Disaster Index evaluates the social and environmental risks derived from the accumulated damage caused by recurrent, small-scale disasters than can undermine countries’ potential to reduce poverty.
* The Prevalent Vulnerability Index surveys countries’ exposure to human and economic losses, their socio-economic fragility and their capacity to absorb the impact and finance recovery from disasters.
* The Risk Management Index evaluates how well countries identify risks, what they do to reduce them, how they respond to and recover from disasters and what budget arrangements and financial protection they have in place to deal with the costs of catastrophic events.
These indicators not only show countries where weaknesses lie; they can also be a tool to monitor how their risk management capacities evolve as well as a source of information to make sounder decisions on their financial, economic, environmental and social organization.
The IDB expects to work with member countries interested in implementing this new system of risk indicators, which can also be adapted to the requirements of sub-national level (provinces, states, regions) and local level (cities and municipalities).
An IDB delegation will participate in the Kobe conference. Environment Division Chief Janine Ferretti will be on the panel Governance, Institutional and Policy Frameworks for Risk Reduction at 1 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 20 in the Kobe Portopia Hotel’s Kairaku Room. She is also due to speak about the role of international financial institutions in promoting risk reduction at a 3 p.m. session in the Kitano Room.
The IDB’s Representative in Japan, Toshio Kobayashi, is scheduled to speak at the panel Reducing and Managing Disaster Risk through Financial Services at 12 noon on Thursday, Jan. 20 in the Kobe Portopia Hotel’s Nunobiki Room. Also, the IDB’s senior specialist on disaster risk management, Caroline Clarke, will be available to discuss the indicators system.
As the leading source of multilateral financing for Latin America and the Caribbean, the IDB supports economic and social development in the region. Among other areas, it works with member countries and specialized agencies to promote disaster prevention and mitigation.