Learning from disasters to build resilience
The Program
2013 – ongoing
Geographic scope: Nepal, Senegal , Mexico, Bangladesh, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Peru, USA, Vietnam, Germany, UK
Partners: Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, Zurich North America, DuPont, IFRC, Practical Action Nepal, Practical Action Peru, Practical Action Senegal, Practical Action Bangladesh, Mexican Red Cross, IIASA
Funders: Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, Zurich Insurance Group, Zurich North America, DuPont, Swiss Development Corporation, American Red Cross, Global Disaster Preparedness Center, IFRC
Overview
The Post-Event Review Capability (PERC) is a methodology for the systematic analysis of a disaster event, focusing on how a specific hazard event became a disaster. PERC uses a system-wide approach to review disasters, analyzing across scales and sectors, and all five aspects of the disaster risk management cycle—prospective and corrective risk reduction, preparedness, response, and recovery. It provides a bird’s-eye view of why the event manifested in the way it did and how resilience might be built.
Learning how past hazard events have unfolded is fundamental to improving future performance — learning allows us to recognize what worked well and what didn’t and adapt our processes accordingly. PERC provides us with a tangible approach that captures this learning and transforms it into tangible actions we can take to strengthen development, disaster risk reduction programming, and disaster risk management.
What we deliver
Working together with our partners, ISET has refined the PERC methodology and conducted over 12 post-event reviews for floods and wildfire, in both urban and rural settings and in global contexts ranging from least- to most-developed. The methodology is currently being expanded to include reviews of extreme heat events.
ISET has also contributed to several summary reports that bring together insights from across multiple PERCs to inform disaster resilience globally, and has published learning from across the PERCs both in the gray literature and in peer-reviewed publications and books.
Key outcomes/results
- Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance teams have used PERCs to inform program development, community programming, and sub-national advocacy, and to build new relationships and engage new stakeholders.
- PERCs have documented both previously unrecognized sources of community and household vulnerability, and poorly recognized opportunities to strengthen resilience.
- ISET and the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance have received invitations to present at conferences, and PERC findings have been republished by other publications, for example, in Civil + Structural Engineering Media.
- PERC results maintain relevancy over time; our earliest reports are still accessed regularly.
Highlights
- Outstanding Achievement Award from the 2019 US National Hurricane Conference
- 2019 Business Insurance Innovation Award
Selected outputs
Building the Evidence Base to Achieve the Sendai Framework for DRR Goals, in Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience
After the Flood Is Before the Next Flood: New Insights from Research and Practice, in Flood Damage Survey and Assessment
