A burning issue: Insights for resilience from three wildfire events

Over the past seven years members of the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance (the Alliance) have conducted 15 post-event reviews of significant flooding events, using the Alliance’s Post-Event Review Capability (PERC) methodology to highlight lessons learned and to draw out practical recommendations for strengthening resilience. Findings from these post-event reviews illustrate commonalities across devastating weather events, which are further detailed in a summary report, and underscore the types of corrective and prospective actions that could be most helpful in reducing the risk.

In 2019 and into early 2020, the PERC methodology was extended to study wildfires, conducting post-event reviews with resilience-minded partners in three countries:
- With the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction (ICLR), Zurich Canada and Zurich North America released a report on the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfires in Canada.
- With DuPont and the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition-International (ISET), Zurich North America released the findings of a post-event review in January 2020, covering the 2017 and 2018 California fires.
- With the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and support from the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre (BNHCRC), Zurich Australia is releasing a post-event report on the Southwest Complex fire in Tasmania of summer 2018-2019. That report is forthcoming in 2020.