Tomorrow's disasters – Embedding foresight principles into disaster risk assessment and treatment

• Published in: International journal of disaster risk reduction Vol. 45; p. 101437
• Main Authors: Riddell, Graeme A., van Delden, Hedwig, Maier, Holger R., Zecchin, Aaron C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 01-05-2020
• Subjects: Disaster risk management; Foresight; Risk assessment; Risk treatment; Scenarios; Disaster risk management; Scenarios; Risk treatment; Risk assessment; Foresight
• ISSN: 2212-4209; 2212-4209
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ijdrr.2019.101437

Disaster risk is a complex, uncertain and evolving threat to society which changes based on broad drivers of hazard, exposure and vulnerability such as population, economic and climatic change, along with new technologies and social preferences. It also evolves as a function of decisions of public policy and public/private investment which alters future risk profiles. These factors however are often not captured within disaster risk assessments and explicitly excluded from the UN General Assembly definition of a disaster risk assessment which focuses on the current state of risk. This means that 1) we cannot adequately capture changes in risk and risk assessments are out of date as soon as published but also 2) we cannot show the benefit of proactive risk treatments in our risk assessments. This paper therefore outlines a generic, scale-neutral, framework for integrating foresight – thinking about the future – into risk assessment methodologies. This is demonstrated by its application to a disaster risk assessment of heatwave risk in Tasmania, Australia, and shows how risk changes across three future scenarios and what proactive treatments could be possible mitigating the identified drivers of future risk.
•Generic framework to integrate principles of foresight into risk management processes including assessment and treatment.•Description of how foresight can be used to enable proactive and strategic risk treatments through dynamic risk assessments.•Demonstrated application of framework to Tasmanian Disaster Risk Assessment for heatwave risk.•Insight into appropriateness of framework and how it can be extended to support proactive disaster risk management.