Strengthening Disaster Risk Governance

Stakeholder engagement and policies are key for disaster risk governance. Accordingly, it is important to:

Engage with practitioners and relevant stakeholders, through steering committees, consultation groups, stakeholder meetings and knowledge exchange programs.
Focus on benefit sharing with a wide range of stakeholders
Help to manage interdependencies by safely sharing information between infrastructure operators, both within and between sectors.
Secure comprehensive government funding from the start of the project.
Evaluate and factor-in climate risks into public investment decision making. When investing in or commissioning infrastructure, governments can require contractors and suppliers to demonstrate they have considered climate risks.
Enable infrastructure resilience through policy and regulation. Governments can facilitate climate-resilient infrastructure by removing policy or regulatory distortions, or adding regulatory requirements to consider climate risks.
Encourage climate risk disclosure: this can encourage action to manage those risks, as well as reveal interdependencies and support the design of public policies.
Share information and promote collaboration between public and private authorities to encourage and support public-private partnerships.

Collaboration is critical to identify vulnerability hotspots, preparing contingency plans and sharing capacity in times of disruption. A combination of public and private operators as well as regulators and policy-makers may manage or have a strong influence over the infrastructure network. However, they may be hesitant to share or collate information on commercial sensitivity or national security grounds. The creation of groups or networks can help to build trust between partners and facilitate the sharing of relevant information, as well as developing suitable processes for the safe sharing and use of sensitive data.

The nature of the risks arising from a combination of local and regional exposure to climatic conditions and specific assets’ vulnerability, makes appropriate responses very context-specific.

Using riverine flooding in Bangladesh as a case study, Mechler and Bouwer (2015) demonstrated that economic vulnerability (the propensity to incur economic losses due to a hazardous event) has been reduced over the past decades, therefore risk increases at a much smaller rate compared to a static vulnerability case.

The key stages for appropriate responses to disaster preparedness following a typical risk-based planning process are shown in Figure 1 and have been used to develop the UKCIP (UK Climate Impacts Programme) wizard tools portfolio, that can be used to plan adaptation strategies and share the message about the need to plan for resilient infrastructure. A detailed explanation of the planning stages can be found here. The wizard in turn is the base for the Climate-ADAPT tool.

Figure 1. The risk-based planning process for an adaptation strategy. Source: UCKIP website

Strengthening Disaster Risk Governance

References