Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

A natural disaster can be defined in its broadest sense as a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society due to the occurrence of an abnormal or infrequent hazard which causes losses that exceed the ability of those affected to cope with (UNISDR 2004: 17, UNDP 2004: 98). Usually, the disaster management literature distinguishes between sudden-onset and slow-onset events (Benson and Clay 2004: 6). Sudden-onset events, including extreme geotectonic events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or slow mass movements and extreme weather events like cyclones, floods or winter storms, cause immediate losses and disruptions. Slow-onset events are either periodical or permanent in nature, like drought or desertification.

This chapter will discuss the notion of natural disaster risk and present an integrated risk management approach against long term macroeconomic risks on the country level which can also be used for cross-country economic vulnerability analysis. The chapter starts with an overall introduction to the notion of risk and specifies the concept in the context of natural disaster events in section 2.2. Because disasters stem from the realization of risk, definitions, conditions and consequences of natural disasters are presented in section 2.3. Section 2.4 summarizes the discussion by presenting a new approach for catastrophic risk management on the country level.

Section 2.3 already presented an introduction to the overall social and environmental consequences of natural disasters. It was noted there, that the economic effects need a more thorough analysis due to the complexity of the topic and the importance for the risk management and modeling approach. Here, a number of issues and open questions about macroeconomic consequences due to natural disasters in the short and in the long term (until 4 years after the disaster) are statistically investigated using a sample of disaster events between 1960 and 2000. The chapter starts by grouping economic effects into three categories: Direct, indirect and macroeconomic effects (ECLAC 2003: (1)9ff, Charvériat 2000: 13ff, Rose 2004: 16f, Mechler 2004a: 31ff).

In this chapter an overview of risk management measures against natural disaster impacts is given. While section 4.1 gives an outline of risk financing instruments, section 4.2 introduces classical and new innovative financing instruments available today for the private sector on the household and business level. Afterwards, section 4.3 gives a more detailed introduction into public sector risk and risk management practices on the governmental level.

In the last chapter an overall introduction to risk management measures against natural disasters from the individual to the country level for the private and public sector was given. However, for a further development of the financial vulnerability concept (e.g. financing gap) as well as for modeling purposes presented in the next chapter a more in-depth discussion about the financial resilience of the public sector is needed.

is used to assess catastrophic risk and to improve risk management strategies (Grossi, Kunreuther and Windeler 2005: 27). The modeling of catastrophe risk is a complex process that depends on subjective and objective inputs related to the natural hazard. After the catastrophe model is built usually it is too complex to be evaluated analytically, especially if long term economic consequences are considered. In a a computer is used to evaluate a model numerically, and data are gathered in order to estimate the characteristics of the model (Law and Kelton 1991: 1). Usually catastrophe modeling implicitly incorporates simulations due to the sheer complexity of the system to be analyzed. Catastrophe modeling and simulation have advantages as well as limitations. Some of them are presented below.

In this chapter the risk management framework presented in section 2.4 is used to examine the financial vulnerability and macroeconomic risk of three different governments in developing countries against natural hazards. Furthermore, ex-ante instruments which increase their financial resilience, explained in section 5.2, are examined and compared with their costs for the government.

As stated in the introduction this thesis focuses on the consequences of sudden-onset natural disasters on the macroeconomic level, especially for the public sector in developing countries. To lessen the impacts of natural disasters proactive risk management strategies were considered and incorporated into an integrated risk management approach to study and assess the costs and benefits of such strategies. The approach was operationalized and built into a catastrophe simulation model called CatSim, which is based on previous work done by G. Pflug and R. Mechler (Freeman et al. 2002a,b). In addition, graphical user interfaces were created to bridge the gap between scientific analysis and policy and implementation issues in the real world. In the following, a summary of the main findings in each chapter including a proposal for future work is presented.