Management and adaptation
In INGENIAR we design products and alternatives for risk management and efficiently facing losses caused by the occurrence of natural phenomena.
New knowledge and advanced science and engineering techniques, allow a more precise loss modelling and a better scientific understanding of risk, allowing the development of instruments and tools for risk reduction and mitigation.
Extreme disasters are characterized by the occurrence of low frequency-high severity phenomena, besides their unpredictability nature. These events cause major impacts that can generate solvency problems for national governments.
The increase in damage and losses to assets in recent decades is due to several factors, including unregulated and vulnerable growth. This combined with environmental degradation processes and socioeconomic problems related to growth and increased population density in prone areas.
To achieve a sustainable development, which benefits a wide spectrum of the society, and a transformative development, it is imperative to count with an integrate disaster risk management that allows for a safe development. Development and land use plans must incorporate risk as a determining factor and risk management in an integral way, in order to correct those aspects that, in the past, have created risk, or that must be avoided so that new risk conditions are not generated.
In INGENIAR, we design and advise on the development of instruments for financial protection based on risk studies, as a public policy complementary to the actions of the State in relation to the traditional approach to risk management.
These mechanisms make it possible to manage risk in its different phases and to reduce the tax burden on the government once a disaster has occurred.
What do we offer?
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Cost-benefit
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Holistic riskassessmentapproach
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Indicators
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Risk
Management
Plans -
Land
Development
Plans -
Early
warning
systems
- The cost-benefit analysis applied to risk analysis is a systematic procedure that allows the evaluation of the decisions that derive from a strategic risk management. The relation cost-benefit is defined as the relation between the value of the losses that could be reduced in case of implementation of a given mitigation program on the exposed elements and the cost that this program would have for each of the sectors of analysis.
- El análisis beneficio-costo aplicado al análisis de riesgo es un procedimiento sistemático que permite evaluar las decisiones que se derivan de una gestión estratégica del riesgo.
- La relación beneficio-costo está definida como la relación entre el valor de las pérdidas que se lograría reducir en caso de implementar un determinado programa de mitigación sobre elementos expuestos y el costo que tendría dicho programa para cada uno de los sectores de análisis.
- Este enfoque es útil para planificar estrategias óptimas de mitigación de riesgo, pues permite hacer comparaciones probabilistas de los beneficios esperados de un plan de gestión de riesgo.
- Besides the occurrence of events, risk is the result of an unplanned urban development and inadequate practices and activities that drive to the construction of elements susceptible to damage in risk prone areas.
- Beyond the potential losses that a society can suffer, social, economic, environmental and cultural factors can define either worse or better conditions that amplify or reduce the impact and the ability to recover from adverse events and create an either stronger or weaker new build environment.
- These factors play an important role in the construction of future risk, in the same way that current risk is the result of past decisions. Although in the last years some progress has been made in the development of practices and activities addressed to reduce and mitigate risk, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to lessen current physical risk in the short term, it implies a steady long-term process. On the other hand, increasing and accumulation of vulnerability are alarming, resulting among other things, of factors such as making uninformed decisions by the political authorities and the communities, which reflects a lack of efficiency in disaster risk management.
- Therefore, an integral disaster risk management strategy must be based on a multidisciplinary approach that considers not only the physical damage and the direct impact but also a set of socioeconomic factors that favour second order effects and consider the intangible impact in case an event occurs, such as the social impact that derives from physical damage and that is related to the effects on the population, on their livelihoods, on social and productive interrelations and on services and cultural values.
- The holistic risk assessment approach aims to reflect risk from a comprehensive perspective by using, in one hand, the physical vulnerability or potential physical damage which is directly linked to the occurrence of hazard events and, on the other hand by capturing how underlying risk drivers or amplifiers –social, economic, environmental factors– (using an aggravating factor, F), which are mainly non-hazard dependent, worsen the current existing physical risk (RF) conditions in terms of lack of capacity to anticipate or resist, or to respond and recover from adverse impacts.
- Disaster risk is not only associated with the occurrence of intense hazard events but also with the vulnerability conditions that favour or facilitate disasters when such events occur. ulnerability is closely linked to social processes and governance weaknesses in disaster-prone areas, and is usually related to a set of fragilities, susceptibilities, and issues regarding the lack of resilience of the exposed human settlements. In other words, disasters are socio-environmental events, which materialization is the result of the social construction of risk. Therefore, risk reduction must be part of the decision-making processes, not only in the case of building back after a disaster, but also in the formulation of public policies and development planning. Hence, it is necessary to strengthen the institutional development and promote investment for vulnerability reduction so as to contribute to the sustainable development of the countries.
- With the aim of improving disaster risk understanding and disaster risk management performance, a transparent, representative and robust System of Indicators, easily understood by public policymakers, relatively easy to update periodically and that allows for clustering and comparison of countries, was developed by the Institute of Environmental Studies (IDEA, in Spanish) of the National University of Manizales.
- This system of indicators was developed between the years 2003 to 2005 with the support of the “Information and Indicators Program for Disaster Risk Management” of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
- The System of Indicators attempts to make accessible relevant information on a country’s vulnerability and risk to national decision-makers. The System uses relative indicators to help the identification and proposal of effective disaster risk management policies and actions. The underlying models attempt to represent risk and risk management schemes at a national scale, allowing for the identification of their essential economic and social characteristics, as well as a comparison of these aspects and the risk context in different countries.
- isk Management plans determined a set of elements, measures and tools addressed at intervene hazards and vulnerability in order to reduce or mitigate existent risk, as well as to generate disaster management plans in the framework of a sustainable development. A risk management plan, although managed from State authorities, must articulate social, political, institutional, public and private forces.
- As specialist in the field of risk assessment and disaster risk management, in INGENIAR we have provided advisory to the Colombian government for the formulation, at national, departmental and provincial level, of several territorial and sectoral plans for disasters attention and prevention and for integral disaster risk management.
- Likewise, we work together with the Ministry of Finance and the National Department for Planning with regard to financial protection and public policies, where one of our major contributions have been the development of the draft legislation that became the Law 1523 of 2012, throughout which the National System for Disaster Risk Management was created.
- We provide technical, scientific and political science advisory so disaster risk management is considered in the development plans as a strategy of sustainable development to consolidate less vulnerable territories.
- One of the most effectives strategies for prevention and risk reduction is urban planning, to the extent that it intends to place population, physical infrastructure and economic activities in areas that are amenable for each type of activity, according to the characteristics and capacities of the territory.
- Land development plans aimed at orientating and regulate land use and occupation in order to have optimal scenarios for socioeconomic development in the geographical environment. Besides land use regulation and occupation, land development plans define programs and projects and the adoption of management instruments for their implementation.
- Municipal land development plans have been promoted in Colombia since the late 1990’s, having as one of the key elements the integration of hazards and risk as determining factors for physical planning, therefore considering risk reduction as one of their components.
- Land development plans regulations are established based on analysis and decision making. In this context, risk and hazard analysis become an essential element, since the results of the risk assessment form the basis for an appropriate understanding of the characteristics of the territory and hence an adequate definition of the contents of the land development plans, especially when it becomes about determining the environmental capacity of possible areas of urban expansion or for localization of new infrastructure, including policies that address risk reduction facing different types of hazards in order to achieve the goals of socioeconomic development.
- In INGENIAR, we develop hazard studies and risk assessment with specific characteristics, to obtain protected areas maps over which different types of areas in risk are defined to facilitate decision making facing relative aspects of land use, type of construction and specific measures for the treatment of these areas. We provide advisory for the creation of disaster risk reduction policies, as well as the design and implementation of monitoring systems for different hazards.
- Early warning systems are a set of preestablished procedures both by the institutions and the population to respond to a probable emergency generated by the imminent occurrence of a disastrous event. Their design is based in one or several reference scenarios obtained from the set of stochastic events generated in the probabilistic assessment. Early Warning Systems are aimed to protect the population and their livelihoods facing the occurrence in the event of a disaster.
- A monitoring system for potentially critical events, is therefore, one of the main components of any EWS. In some specific cases it is possible to know about the occurrence of an event with destructive capacity before it impacts, and with the right instrumentation, it is possible to send an alarm signal few seconds after the occurrence of the event to activate the EWS.
- On the other hand, even in the cases where there is not enough time for evacuations, it is possible to generate an immediate estimation of both, the distribution of the maximum intensities expected for the event and its expected impact, in order to obtain basic information that allows responsible authorities to react as soon as possible.
- Having a model that enables the estimation of the impact of an event in an area of interest, based on the intensity of the recorded event, it is possible to make decisions about what actions should be taken. This is the conceptual base for early warning systems and immediate estimation of impacts after an event, so that the only record of an intensity in a reference equipment make it possible to activate emergency and contingency plans and guide the required response a short time after an event occurs.
