A framework to support policy-making for regional disaster resilience
21 Oct | Prof. Rachel Davidson will present a framework to identify policy solutions for disaster risk management to strengthen a region's resilience at this Future Resilient Systems webinar.
Disaster risk is increasing mainly due to the growing exposure of people and assets to natural hazards, resulting from migration to coastal areas and the expansion of cities in flood plains, sometimes coupled with poor building standards. An understanding of possible strategies to minimise losses to homeowners, insurers and other stakeholders, as well as their behaviour and interactions, would strengthen the regional governments’ disaster risk management capabilities.
In this talk, Prof Rachel Davidson from the Disaster Research Center at the University of Delaware will describe a computational framework to identify disaster risk management policy solutions. It considers the behaviour of the system as a whole, including interactions among stakeholder groups (homeowners, insurers, government, reinsurers) and strategies (retrofit, insurance, property acquisition).
Specifically, the framework supports the following government decisions:
- How much to spend on supporting retrofits
- How to regulate the price of extreme event insurance
- How to allocate spending between homeowner retrofit grants and property acquisition
- How to design retrofit grant and acquisition programmes (e.g., grant amount to offer).
The framework includes four interacting mathematical models: stochastic programming optimisation models to represent the government’s and insurer’s decisions, empirical discrete choice models of individual homeowner’s decisions, and a regional loss estimation. It includes a description of the insurers’ and homeowners’ expected response to government policies and what the outcomes will be for each stakeholder type.
A full-scale application for hurricane risk in eastern North Carolina, United States suggests it is possible to identify system-wide win-win solutions for each stakeholder type individually and for society as a whole.
Speaker:
Rachel Davidson is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a core faculty member in the Disaster Research Center, and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Chief Diversity Advocate in the College of Engineering at the University of Delaware. She conducts research on natural disaster risk modelling and civil infrastructure systems. She is a Fellow and Past-President of the Society for Risk Analysis and recipient of the 2019 ASCE Charles Martin Duke Lifeline Earthquake Engineering award.