A disaster risk management performance index

Abstract

The Risk Management Index, RMI, proposed in this paper, brings together a group of indicators that measure risk management performance and effectiveness. These indicators reflect the organizational, development, capacity and institutional actions taken to reduce vulnerability and losses in a given area, to prepare for crisis and to recover efficiently from disasters. This index is designed to assess risk management performance. It provides a quantitative measure of management based on predefined qualitative targets or benchmarks that risk management efforts should aim to achieve. The design of the RMI involved establishing a scale of achievement levels or determining the distance between current conditions and an objective threshold or conditions in a reference country, sub-national region, or city. The proposed RMI is constructed by quantifying four public policies, each of which is described by six indicators. The mentioned policies include the identification of risk, risk reduction, disaster management, and governance and financial protection. Risk identification comprises the individual perception, social representation and objective assessment; risk reduction involves the prevention and mitigation; disaster management comprises response and recovery; and, governance and financial protection policy is related to institutionalization and risk transfer. Results at the urban, national and sub-national levels, which illustrate the application of the RMI in those scales, are finally given.

Appendix

AHP is a technique widely used for multi-attribute decision making (Saaty 1980, 1987; Saaty and Vargas 1991). It enables decomposition of a problem into hierarchy and assures that both qualitative and quantitative aspects of a problem are incorporated in the evaluation process, during which opinion is systematically extracted by means of pairwise comparisons. AHP allows the application of data, experience, knowledge, and intuition of a logical and deep form.

The core of AHP is an ordinal pairwise comparison of attributes, indicators in this context, in which preference statements are addressed. For a given objective, the comparisons are made per pairs of indicators by first posing the question “Which of the two is the more important?” and second “By how much?” The strength of preference is expressed on a semantic scale of 1–9, which keeps measurement within the same order of magnitude. A preference of 1 indicates equality between two indicators while a preference of 9 indicates that one indicator is 9 times larger or more important than the one to which it is being compared. The relative weights of the indicators are calculated using an eigenvector technique. One of the advantages of this method is that it is able to check the consistency of the comparison matrix through the calculation of the eigenvalues.

The matrices allowing the comparison of the assigned relative importance, together with the respective index of consistency and the weights or priority vector, have been obtained for the indicators of each policy for the example of Bogotá (see Tables 13–20).

Table 13 Matrix of comparisons for risk identification

Table 14 Importance for risk identification

Table 15 Matrix of comparisons for risk reduction

Table 16 Importance for risk reduction

Table 17 Matrix comparisons for disaster management

Table 18 Importance for disaster management

Table 19 Matrix of comparisons for financial protection

Table 20 Importance for financial protection