Lessons for the Past and Opportunities for Insurance Mechanisms of Flood Risk Management in South America Related to International Strategies (PAP014946)

Código

PAP014946

Autores

Eduardo Mário Mendiondo, Juan Valdes, Yosuke Yamashiki, Stephan Theobald

Tema

Floods in a changing climate

Resumo

This paper present recent past lessons and feasible opportunities of flood risk management (FRM) in South America. The total 'flood market' in South America is estimated at about US$80 billion a year and is expected to increase until 2075, converting reactive policies to proactive ones. South American countries are affected annually by a 2% to 5% decrease in GDP caused by non-prevented floods, which are converted to social disasters - the so called 'flood- poverty-cycle' (FPCycle). Anthropocene's drivers of the food-water-energy nexus force FRM to rapidly adapt to increasing FPCycles. On the one hand, accumulated losses from the South American floods were approximately US$25 billion in the last decade, including immediate repair and operation and maintenance (O&M) costs. Total figures outline that post-flood restoration plans transfer annual debts, with rates of US$30 to 3,500 per capita, to populations living at either poor, vulnerable settlements or even at metropolitan areas, respectively. Moreover, transboundary nature of South American river basins enlarge these impacts. Until year 2010, there was a net positive increase in O&M flood losses of about US$2 billion a year, either because of lack of prevention or contingency flood plans. On the other hand, preliminary scenarios up to the year 2050 outline the possibility of reducing costs at a relative annual rate of US$150 per capita through wise FRM, and reducing the FPCycles by an order of magnitude of fifty times with appropriate flood strategies and new public-private partnerships. Alternative scenarios show that O&M costs could reduce to US$0.5 billion a year until 2020 if early warning systems are included in river committee plans, with an increase in the monitoring and forecast of impacts in ungauged basins. A new emerging gap with a transition phase in South American FRM is foreseeable, as concepts of flood disaster mitigation are increasingly replaced by visions of early-warning systems and transfer-risk devices through flood insurance. This study present a comparative appraisal of how flood insurance mechanisms could be feasibly adapted for scenarios of changing climate. We present not only methods of assessing risk of flooding, but also strategies useful for vulnerable communities, with some comparison with other strategies in North America, Europe and Asia.