1 May Flood Risk: What Gets Measured Gets Done
Posted at 10:58 in Flood Resilience by Rene Willemsen
In business we run our companies with a set of KPIs to give us a basis for sound decision-making. The phrase ‘What gets measured gets done’ underpins much of the day-to-day running of organisations both large and small. Fortunately the numbers we need are becoming ever more prevalent – look no further than the recent boom in analytics and BI (Business Intelligence) – but measuring risk, however, can be much more elusive.
In Flood Risk and Resilience there are almost no reliable numbers to help businesses prepare for disaster and get a sense of how they are performing relative to their peers and competitors.
This is a critical factor in helping businesses being not only ready for any eventuality but resilient afterwards to get back running again as fast as possible and at the lowest possible cost. What if we could provide a scale, benchmark scores and a way to calculate risk and readiness?
The Zurich Insurance Company may be a lone lighthouse here. They have been working with the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania and the IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) to create a methodology (link here) to measure flood resilience around (largely) civil projects. This initial work, although initially focused on major measures, appears to provide a framework for businesses to understand the cost-benefit analysis of implementing preventative and resilient measures.
If there is to be a material improvement on the effect on the British economy of flooding, there is a need to develop this initial work and make it widely applicable and understandable. To build a simple set of measurements that produce a set of actionable insights would not only have immediate benefits to businesses and local communities but also the wider national economy.
The basis for this discovery work and analysis is emerging as relevant data becomes available from a myriad of sources – Sensors around the burgeoning Internet of Things, newly open government data, anonymised insurance and financial data, weather and manufacturing product data. There is sufficient raw material to start the process of creating metrics and a scoring system to make decisions with.
Global weather change is presenting us with a unique challenge, let’s prepare for its effects it in a unique way.