The ROI of Mitigation Measures in Emergency Management

The rise in billion-dollar weather events

Catastrophic weather events are costly. They’re also getting costlier by the year. 

The numbers, here, are staggering. Last year, the team at the NOAA Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) released a billion-dollar disaster report covering the year 2021.

The findings weren’t pretty. The year 2021 came in second only to the years 2020, 2017, and 2005 in terms of number of disasters (20) and associated costs (USD 145 billion)ⁱ. 

Zooming out, the report also found that the U.S. (alone) sustained well over 300 severe weather/climate events since 1980ⁱⁱ. Costs associated with these disasters clocked in at USD 2.7 trillion.

What’s more, the overall trendline points in the wrong direction. The average number of severe events and their associated costs have all increased since the 1980s, as the following table demonstrates.

Source: NOAA Centers for Environmental Information

Nor have things calmed down since. As of July 2022, the U.S. had experienced nine-billion-dollar weather events, one drought and eight severe storms, both categories of disaster that are on the precipitous rise

Indeed, gone are the days of one-in-every-100-year weather events, with conditions likely to worsen.

According to researcher Margaret Cook, modelling predicts that in many climate-vulnerable areas, a 1-in-20-year annual maximum 24-hour precipitation rate (to take but one example) is likely to become a 1-in-5 to 1-in-15-year event by the end of the century.

In turn, this acute acceleration of the disaster threat is actively burdening residents in climate-vulnerable areas, their governments (particularly local), and relief agencies. Governments and agencies are operating with fewer resources while facing deteriorating threat levels. 

What then can be done to build resiliency, protect communities, and avoid a repeat of costly events?

The need to pre-empt severe weather events sooner

The simple answer is that severe weather events must be pre-empted sooner. One quick way to do so is to reduce reliance on short-term weather models. 

These around-the-clock weather forecasts have value. However, they routinely fail to project the arrival and behavior of extreme weather events accurately. 

The latter arrive too quickly and change too dramatically. Often, by the time forecasts pick them up, it’s too late. 

Where should investments go, instead? 

Mitigation pays down the road

The numbers suggest that investments should go into cost-effective mitigation efforts in climate-vulnerable areas. The measures most often cited by experts include adopting and strengthening building codes, upgrading existing buildings, and improving transportation systems.

These interventions aren’t just picked at random. They’ve been studied closely, shown not only to enhance reliance but also to pay for themselves (and more) over time.

How so? The Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves reportiii, funded by three federal agencies and four private-sector sponsors in the U.S., found the following:

• Adopting the latest building code requirements saves USD 11 per USD 1 invested. Building codes have greatly improved society’s disaster resilience, while adding only about 1 per cent to construction costs relative to 1990 standards. The greatest benefits accrue to communities using the most recent code editions. 
• Above-code design could save USD 4 per USD 1 cost. Building codes set minimum requirements to protect life safety. Stricter requirements can cost-effectively boost life safety and speed functional recovery.
• Private-sector building retrofits could save USD 4 per USD 1 cost. Investments of over USD 500 billion to upgrade residences with 15 measures could save more than USD 2 trillion.
• Lifeline retrofit saves USD 4 per USD 1 cost. Society relies on telecommunications, roads, power, water, and other lifelines. Case studies show that upgrading lifelines to better resist disasters helps our economy and society.
• Federal grants save USD 6 per USD 1 cost. Public-sector investment in mitigation since 1995 by FEMA, EDA, and HUD cost the country USD 27 billion but will ultimately save USD 160 billion.

Further best-practice mitigation measures

Indeed, stakeholders can’t just wish away vulnerability, which is a fact of nature. 

They can, however, better understand how that vulnerability has been exacerbated by longstanding social and political processes and work to correct the trend through targeted mitigation efforts that pay for themselves over the long run.

That is the argument experts like climatologist Friederike Otto of the Imperial College London makes. Otto calls out poor governance, noting that in urban areas, natural hazards will often become disasters due to poor, non-riskinformed, urban planning^iv: 

The results are inadequate infrastructure, a lack of social support systems that could reduce impacts or help with recovery from past disasters, and processes that push the most vulnerable groups of people to live in hazardous areas. This causes disproportionate impacts (visible and invisible loss and damage),
especially where there are multiple hazards at the same time^v. 

Given that context, mitigation efforts must begin with stakeholders finally addressing human-caused social and physical vulnerabilities, a shift in paradigm away from defensive action and towards proactive risk management.

Some jurisdictions are well on their way. In Australia, the former Morrison Government introduced a National Resilience and Climate Adaptation Strategy 2021-2025. 

The Strategy is meant to operate across four domains, natural, built, social and economic, recognizing that adaptation is a shared responsibility requiring sustained and ongoing action.

To that end, it identifies the following three objectives are needed to enable more effective adaptation:

• Drive investment and action through collaboration
• Improve climate information and services
• Assess progress and improve over time.

Further mitigation best-practices with a focus on reducing flooding risk

What other mitigation efforts pay off in the long run? For catastrophic flooding, one of the faster growing disaster events, international best practice, particularly in the European Union, has converged around a set of potential strategies governments and communities can take to achieve resilience, improve response, and save on recovery costs.

Those strategies revolve around the river-basin approach, accounting for the interdependence and interaction of effects of individual measures implemented along the same water course. 

What’s argued is that water-management systems, forecasting, flood defense measures, and crisis management must all be organized on a river basin basis, cutting across regional boundaries. 

Furthermore, investments should also be made in cooperation with the relevant organizations in the fields of hydrology and meteorology, mitigation planning, river control, civil protection, as well as crisis management. 

What other mitigation investments yield positive ROI? The following should help:

• Taking an integrated approach. Effective mitigation also requires structural measures. In the case of flooding, for instance, that might mean limiting human activity in known flood plains (to the extent practicable) through building codes and legislation to keep structures away from flood-prone areas and appropriate land-use policies for vulnerable areas. 

In some cases, even relocation of extremely endangered activities and buildings may be advisable. When not possible, governments must bolster efforts to educate populations on how to act during floods with correct risk communication and early-warning systems. 

Floodplains themselves should also be adequately designed, with effective flood-control structures. What will it take?

Preliminary flood protection strategies must be developed with an eye to associated costs, technical feasibility, environmental impact, as well as social acceptability. 

Indeed, taking such an integrated approach will require interdisciplinary co-operation at all government and local levels for a coordination of sectoral policies regarding environmental protection, physical planning, land use planning, agriculture, transport and urban development, and a co-ordination regarding all phases of risk management – from risk assessment to mitigation planning and implementation of measures. 

A holistic approach therefore will be necessary, facilitated by increased knowledge about responsibility, function, and capacity of the concerned parties, better understanding, and a better support for decision making.

Such a proposed expansion of policy will necessarily demand new knowledge, so that societal, administrative, and technological solutions can be investigated in advance.

• Create an integrated and comprehensive action plan. Finally, these measures should eventually be compiled in a comprehensive action plan for reducing damage. The action plan will accomplish the following: 
  • Draw long-term conclusions for preventive action in water management, land use, settlement policy, and finance
  • Define the scope of responsibilities in the flood protection system at levels of the government and local administration, responsibilities of public (individuals) and business companies
  • Ensure permanent and integrated planning of functions and use of the river basin
  • Specify principles for its organization and co-ordinates investment activities and other activities affecting the river basin. It should also form conditions for ensuring permanent harmony of all natural, civilization and cultural functions in the basin.

Lastly, technology will also come in handy. Stakeholders should support their mitigation activities with risk matrices and critical infrastructure protection tools found in emergency management software platforms like Noggin’s. These tools work to identify at-risk areas and facilities both before and during incidents.

But these technologies only work in tandem with best-practice measures, some of which have been cited above. And so, to the extent practicable, stakeholders must proactively change focus to mitigation activities, promoting the coordinated development and management of actions regarding water, land, and related resources to achieve resilience, improve response, and cut down on recovery costs.

Sources

i. Adam B. Smith, Climate.gov: 2021 U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in historical context. Available at https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond data/2021-us-billion-dollar-weather-and-climate-disasters-historical?itid=lk_inline_ enhanced template#:~:text=Damages%20from%20the%202021%20disasters,Western%20wildfires%20(%2410.9%20billion).

ii. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI): U.S. Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters (2022). Available at https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/.

iii. National Institute of Building Sciences: Mitigation Saves: Mitigation Saves up to $13 per $1 Invested. Available at http://2021.nibs.org/files/pdfs/ms_v4_overview.pdf.

iv. Friederike Otto et al., Nature: Stop blaming the climate for disasters. Available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-021-00332-2.pdf.

v. Ibid.