The use of catastrophe loss modelling methodologies to design and monitor disaster resilience goals and indicators in a post-2015 framework
This paper considers the 2015 renewal of the Millennium Development Goals as an unprecedented opportunity to incorporate goals around improved disaster resilience into the agenda for sustainable development, as it coincides with the renewal of the Hyogo Framework for Action, the global agreement to build resilience to disasters. It questions the possibility of maintaining the idea of measuring outcomes and and the difficulty of measuring performance from disaster statistics, using models for risk auditing of sufficient standard for future development goals.
The paper addresses the use of probabilistic catastrophe models as a tool to design and measure development goals focused on ‘expected’ outcomes of disasters, such as the ‘expected average annual mortality rate’ from earthquakes. It asserts that the availability of catastrophe models will have many ancillary benefits for lower income countries, supporting the development of risk transfer instruments, and quantifying the outcomes of alternative disaster risk management options.