Considering the impacts of simultaneous perils: The challenges of integrating earthquake and tsunamigenic risk
Disaster Prevention and Management
ISSN: 0965-3562
Article publication date: 7 October 2019
Issue publication date: 11 November 2019
Abstract
Purpose
The development of multi-hazard risk assessment frameworks has gained momentum in the recent past. Nevertheless, the common practice with openly available risk data sets, such as the ones derived from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction Global Risk Model, has been to assess risk individually for each peril and afterwards aggregate, when possible, the results. Although this approach is sufficient for perils that do not have any interaction between them, for the cases where such interaction exists, and losses can be assumed to occur simultaneously, there may be underestimation of losses. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper summarizes a methodology to integrate simultaneous losses caused by earthquakes and tsunamis, with a peril-agnostic approach that can be expanded to other hazards. The methodology is applied in two relevant locations in Latin America, Acapulco (Mexico) and Callao (Peru), considering in each case building by building exposure databases with portfolios of different characteristics, where the results obtained with the proposed approach are compared against those obtained after the direct aggregation of individual losses.
Findings
The fully probabilistic risk assessment framework used herein is the same of the global risk model but applied at a much higher resolution level of the hazard and exposure data sets, showing its scalability characteristics and the opportunities to refine certain inputs to move forward into decision-making activities related to disaster risk management and reduction.
Originality/value
This paper applies for the first time the proposed methodology in a high-resolution multi-hazard risk assessment for earthquake and tsunami in two major coastal cities in Latin America.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and the anonymous reviewers who provided valuable input for the GAR19 contributing paper that served as a basis for the first version of this manuscript.
Citation
Ordaz, M., Salgado-Gálvez, M.A., Huerta, B., Rodríguez, J.C. and Avelar, C. (2019), "Considering the impacts of simultaneous perils: The challenges of integrating earthquake and tsunamigenic risk", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 28 No. 6, pp. 823-837. https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-09-2019-0295
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2019, Emerald Publishing Limited