Assessing the costs and benefits of pro-active disaster risk management to meet the needs of vulnerable communities in South Asia.

News

• A series of 9 Working Papers published by the ProVention consortium

• A first workshop held in February in Delhi with the Indian National Institute of Disaster Management. Future dissemination activities in Pakistan and Nepal are to follow.

Description
Climate change, degradation of water resource systems and disaster risk together represent some of the greatest challenges to sustainable development over the coming decades. South Asia is already a disaster hotspot and climate climate is expected to add additional stress. A IIASA team composed of Reinhard Mechler, Daniel Kull, Stefan Hochrainer, Georg Pflug, Unmesh Patnaik, Fawad Khan and Joanne Linnerooth-Bayer in collaboration with the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition (ISET) and local partners assessed the challenges and opportunities for disaster risk management and climate adaptation in  India, Pakistan and Nepal.

The cases analyzed illustrate that disaster risk reduction can “pay.”  Whether or not DRM generates returns that justify public investment, however, depends on the details of the specific strategy implemented.  In order to generate positive economic returns at a level that competes effectively with other avenues for public investment, however, risk management strategies need to be tailored to specific contexts.  They also need to reflect the best possible knowledge regarding the impacts of climate change on regions. These impacts can fundamentally change the returns to different strategies and their resilience as conditions change.

 The IIASA team led the development and application of a methodological approach for assessing disaster risks, climate change and the costs and benefits of reducing risks across a series of case areas in India, Nepal and Pakistan. 

The project focused on water related disasters and the manner in which they may change as a consequence of climate change.  The objective has been to develop a suite of methods and analytical cases that both illustrate how the benefits and costs of different risk reduction strategies can be evaluated under different climate scenarios and also generate analytical results for the risk reduction strategies evaluated.

The programme took a comparative multi-hazard case-study approach, with micro- and macro-modeling methodologies used to quantify the costs and benefits of risk reduction for selected risk management interventions. Analytical frameworks were utilized to enable exploration of the role governance and institutional factors play at local and national levels in the functioning of, and anticipated benefits from, investments in risk reduction or risk transfer. Research was undertaken to identify specific opportunities for risk reduction or transfer within the national policy and governance context.

Funding Agency:
U.K. Department for International Development (DFID)

Duration:
August 2006–December 2008

Partners:
Institute for Social and Environmental Transition (ISET) 
ISET-Nepal  
ISET-Pakistan
Winrock International India 
Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group (GEAG)
ProVention Consortium

IIASA Researchers:
Reinhard Mechler (Project Leader)
Daniel Kull
Stefan Hochrainer
Unmesh Patnaik
Fawad Khan
Joanne Bayer


Web site:
http://www.climate-transitions.org/

Responsible for this page: Jun Watabe
Last updated: 24 Feb 2011