The 4th national risk assessment: Climbing commercial closures

This report presents new methodology developed and applied for estimating vulnerability (which is specific to large buildings, such as retail, office, and multi-unit residential buildings) in order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of risk. Estimates related to vulnerability include structural damages (repair costs), downtime (days closed and unable to work for repair), direct economic damages (from retail and office buildings being closed), and indirect economic damages (macroeconomic level impacts). Understanding and quantifying the ways in which that exposure relates to commercial real-estate vulnerability is essential to understanding where the effects of climate are already being felt, and where they will be most pronounced in the future.

The results captured in this report make use of a series of building specific, multivariate, damage functions that were developed using a component based approach, rather than simply on historic damage observations. This differentiation allows for the overcoming of the limitations documented above through the application of a “first principles of engineering” approach. Furthermore, much of existing literature finds that the costs of disasters is often undervalued as they only account for structural impacts.