PERC Medley 2023: Cross-learning to improve disaster resilience globally

This latest summary report of lessons learnt and recommendations is based on more than 20 PERC event reviews altogether. It focuses on the most recent disaster events that the Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance (“Alliance”) and its partners have analyzed using the award-winning PERC methodology.

From across the past disaster events that they studied in detailed and assessed for commonalities in the previous chapters, the authors have identified several key themes: 

• Early warning systems are brilliant when they work, but they need to be further strengthened, everywhere; 
• Society is still too often surprised and overwhelmed by large, unexpected, yet not unrealistic events; 
• Unsustainable river management practices that exacerbate flooding need to be overcome; 
• There is an overreliance of grey infrastructure, the hard thresholds of which brings the risk of cascading failures. Engineers and decision-makers need to retain an awareness of and plan for this residual risk; 
• The international community needs to broaden the focus of DRM systems beyond response and build DRM capacity at all levels, but particularly local; 
• Dealing with disasters in isolation is a luxury, society needs to be better prepared to respond to polycrises;
• Flood risk is being exacerbated by climate change, so we need to learn quickly and plan for the future events we know we’ll experience.