Partnerships are affordable and equitable policy instruments for disaster risk reduction

The ENHANCE project (Enhancing risk management partnerships for catastrophic natural disasters in Europe) analyses and develops new multi-sector partnernsips (MSPs) between public and private sectors, with emphasis on the financial sector. Analysing existing MSPs in ten case studies across Europe, ENHANCE explores the roles of actors and stakeholders, and systematically examines their successes and failures in increasing resilience to natural hazards and disasters and their associated tasks.

For instance, regarding flood risk management, it has been found that there are several reasons why private insures have difficulties in offering flood insurance at low cost:

• It is difficult to estimate uncertain extreme events.
• In many areas flood risk information is still very limited.
• Flood losses are volatile.
• Capactiy to cover potentially large and correlated natural disaster losses can be limited.

ENHANCE aims at developing and analysing new ways to enhance society's resilience to catastrophic natural hazard impacts. The hazards are related to hear waves, forest fires, flood, drought, storm surge, and volcanic eruptions.