Operationalizing Resilience Against Natural Disaster Risk: Opportunities, Barriers, and a Way Forward

The risks from floods have been rising globally due to increasing population, urbanization and economic development in hazard prone areas. The number of flood disasters throughout the world nearly doubled in the decade from 2000-2009 compared to the previous decade. There have been more flood disasters in the last four years (2010-2013) than in the whole decade of the 1980's. Evidence indicates that climate change-induced sea level rise, storm surge and more intense flooding will reinforce this trend unless risk management measures are undertaken immediately to well manage future losses and make communities more resilient to flooding. It is widely recognized that there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between disaster risk and development: disasters impact development and development impacts disasters. Evidence shows that repeated disasters undermine long-term socio-economic objectives. This is particularly evident in low income countries where disasters can impede the development process. The extensive time required to recover from damage, loss of capacity with which to rebuild and systemic risk negatively affect livelihoods in these countries, in the extreme case trapping people in poverty. In developed countries, recent floods triggered massive economic losses and undermined long-term competitiveness. The impact of disasters is felt most acutely by households and communities. In both developing and developed countries alike, local level studies strongly indicate that the poor suffer disproportionately due to the lack of financial and social safety nets, and institutional representation. Development can affect disaster risk via three main channels: by (1) increasing the physical assets and people exposed to the risk, (2) increasing the capacity to reduce the risk, respond to the risk and recover from the risk and (3) increasing or decreasing the vulnerability based on specific development strategies chosen. We identify this interaction as a key research gap; taking account of and balancing development opportunities with disaster risk will require a paradigm shift in the way we think about and do both development and disaster risk management

Climate change and increased risk for the insurance sector: A global perspective and an assessment for the Netherlands.

Climate change is projected to increase the frequency and severity of extreme weather events. As a consequence, economic losses caused by natural catastrophes could increase significantly. This will have considerable consequences for the insurance sector. On the one hand, increased risk from weather extremes requires assessing expected changes in damage and including adequate climate change projections in risk management. On the other hand, climate change can also bring new business opportunities for insurers. This paper gives an overview of the consequences of climate change for the insurance sector and discusses several strategies to cope with and adapt to increased risks. The particular focus is on the Dutch insurance sector, as the Netherlands is extremely vulnerable to climate change, especially with regard to extreme precipitation and flooding. Current risk sharing arrangements for weather risks are examined while potential new business opportunities, adaptation strategies, and public-private partnerships are identified. © The Author(s) 2009

Prospect theory, mitigation and adaptation to climate change

Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges in current environmental policy. Appropriate policies intended to stimulate efficient adaptation and mitigation should not exclusively rely on the assumption of the homo oeconomicus, but take advantage of well-researched alternative behavioural patterns. Prospect theory provides a number of climate-relevant insights, such as the notion that evaluations of outcomes are reference dependent, and the relevance of perceived certainty of outcomes. This paper systematically reviews what prospect theory can offer to analyse mitigation and adaptation. It is shown that accounting for reference dependence and certainty effects contributes to a better understanding of some well-known puzzles in the climate debate, including (but not limited to) the different uptake of mitigation and adaptation amongst individuals and nations, the role of technical vs. financial adaptation, and the apparent preference for hard protection measures in coastal adaptation. Finally, concrete possibilities for empirical research on these effects are proposed

Mental accounting, access motives, and overinsurance

People exercising mental accounting have an additional motive for buying insurance. They perceive a risk of having insufficient funds available to self-insure. In this way insurance protects the consumption value of the insured asset beyond the expenditure to acquire/replace it. This complements previous approaches based on probability weighting and loss aversion to explain the high profitability of warranties and an aversion toward deductibles. It helps to account for why the value of a warranty is found to be positively related to the value of the product and why there is seemingly contradictory empirical evidence on how household income affects demand for warranties. The adapted model rationalizes a strong aversion to deductibles, and explains the observed sensitivity of this aversion to the insurance context. Finally, it predicts a strong impact of how an insurer pays out benefits on the value and cost of insurance. This can explain both the evidence on strong deductible aversion for flood insurance and the lack of such evidence for long-term care insurance

Women and citizenship post-trafficking : the case of Nepal

The research for this paper was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council – ESRC Res-062-23-1490: ‘Post Trafficking in Nepal: Sexuality and Citizenship in Livelihood Strategies’. Diane Richardson would like to acknowledge the support provided by the award of a Leverhulme TrustMajor Research Fellowship, ‘Transforming Citizenship: Sexuality, Gender and Citizenship Struggles’ [award MRF-2012-106].This article analyses the relationship between gender, sexuality and citizenship embedded in models of citizenship in the Global South, specifically in South Asia, and the meanings associated with having - or not having - citizenship. It does this through an examination of women's access to citizenship in Nepal in the context of the construction of the emergent nation state in the 'new' Nepal 'post-conflict'. Our analysis explores gendered and sexualized constructions of citizenship in this context through a specific focus on women who have experienced trafficking, and are beginning to organize around rights to sustainable livelihoods and actively lobby for changes in citizenship rules which discriminate against women. Building from this, in the final section we consider important implications of this analysis of post-trafficking experiences for debates about gender, sexuality and citizenship more broadly.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Interactive Actor Analysis for Rural Water Management in The Netherlands

Recent developments in the policy sciences emphasize the social environment in which decisions are made. The ‘network metaphor’ is often used to describe the key role of interactions between interdependent actors involved in decision making. These interactions take place in a policy arena drawn up by actors with an interest in and control over decisions on the issues addressed. Interdependencies, caused by the need for actors to increase their means of realizing objectives, are the driving force behind these interactions. Dependency relations are of special interest to water management and river basin management because of the fundamental asymmetrical interdependencies that exist in river basins between upstream and downstream stakeholders. Coleman’s linear system of action models decision making process involving dependencies between multiple stakeholders as exchange of control over issues, while interactions are required to negotiate exchanges of control. We developed an interactive method for actor analysis based on Coleman’s linear system of action and applied it to the national rural water management policy domain in The Netherlands. The method is firmly rooted in mathematical sociology and defies the criticism that methods for actor and stakeholder analysis do not specify a theoretical basis explaining the causal relations between the variables analyzed and policy change. With the application to the rural water management policy arena we intended to increase our insight into the practical applicability of this analyticmethod in an interactive workshop, the acceptability of the approach for the participating actors, its contribution to the process of decision making and our understanding of the rural water management policy arena in The Netherlands. We found that the Association of Water Authorities, the Ministry of Public Works and the Ministry of Agriculture are the most powerful actor in the policy domain, while governance and cost and benefits of rural water management are the most salient issues. Progress in policy development for rural water management is probably most promising for the issues governance, costs and benefits, safety and rural living conditions through improved interaction between the Association of Water Authorities, the Ministry of Agriculture and the Rural Credit Bank. Besides these analytic results the interactive approach implemented increased the participants understanding of their dependency on other actors in the rural water management policy domain and supported them in developing a sound perspective on their dependency position. We concluded that the method developed is acceptable to real-world policy decision makers, can successfully be applied in an interactive setting, potentially contributes to the process of decision making by increasing the participants understanding of their dependency position, has the potential to delivers valuable advice for future decision-making and increases our understanding of policy development for rural water management in general