Identifying the underlying risk factors of local communities in Chile

Chile complies with seven of the nine criteria of climate change vulnerability according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Consequently, Chile has a National Policy for Disaster Risk Management and a National Strategic Plan that was developed by the National Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, an entity formed in Chile since 2012 and which is the most important mechanism of intersectoral coordination for the formulation, implementation and evaluation of public policy in this area. 

The National Platform for DRR is a cornerstone for disaster risk management efforts in Chile. In this sense, it took charge of one of the priorities established in the National Policy as it is the reduction of the underlying risk factors (URF) which allowed the development of the Methodology of Identification and Characterization of the Underlying Risk Factors to local level, in 2016. This tool is applied in the country starting in 2017 with the close collaboration between the National Emergency Office of the Ministry of the Interior and Public Security (ONEMI) and local governments.

Therefore, this paper presents the background and context for the methodology, to describe then its components and preliminary results to provide a new approach to assess the vulnerability of local communities for better decision making towards reducing disaster risk. The methodology was formulated by reviewing and considering the methodologies applied in different regions of the world, which generally coincide with the dimensions that comprise the underlying factors of disaster risk. However, the numerical treatment of the variables obeys to novel statistical processing, which provides robustness to the model and, therefore, to the results obtained.