Considering the impacts of simultaneous perils: The challenges of integrating earthquake and tsunamigenic risk

Abstract

Purpose

The development of multi-hazard risk assessment frameworks has gained momentum in the recent past. Nevertheless, the common practice with openly available risk data sets, such as the ones derived from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction Global Risk Model, has been to assess risk individually for each peril and afterwards aggregate, when possible, the results. Although this approach is sufficient for perils that do not have any interaction between them, for the cases where such interaction exists, and losses can be assumed to occur simultaneously, there may be underestimation of losses. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper summarizes a methodology to integrate simultaneous losses caused by earthquakes and tsunamis, with a peril-agnostic approach that can be expanded to other hazards. The methodology is applied in two relevant locations in Latin America, Acapulco (Mexico) and Callao (Peru), considering in each case building by building exposure databases with portfolios of different characteristics, where the results obtained with the proposed approach are compared against those obtained after the direct aggregation of individual losses.

Findings

The fully probabilistic risk assessment framework used herein is the same of the global risk model but applied at a much higher resolution level of the hazard and exposure data sets, showing its scalability characteristics and the opportunities to refine certain inputs to move forward into decision-making activities related to disaster risk management and reduction.

Originality/value

This paper applies for the first time the proposed methodology in a high-resolution multi-hazard risk assessment for earthquake and tsunami in two major coastal cities in Latin America.

Citation

Ordaz, M., Salgado-Gálvez, M.A., Huerta, B., Rodríguez, J.C. and Avelar, C. (2019), "Considering the impacts of simultaneous perils: The challenges of integrating earthquake and tsunamigenic risk", Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 28 No. 6, pp. 823-837. https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-09-2019-0295