DEALING WITH GEOLOGICAL HAZARDS
NIBS Report Builds Foundation for Hazard Mitigation Efforts
Julia Jeanty Julia is a 2018 graduate from the University of Florida with a dual degree in Environmental Geosciences
and Sustainability Studies, as well as certificates in Geospatial Information Analysis and Meteorology and Climatology. Most recently, Julia worked at the American Geosciences Institute as a Geoscience Policy Intern and then as a Talent Pool Intern at the American Geophysical Union.
Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves: Past and Present Wildfires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes: 2017 was no
stranger to the full-forced havoc that natural disasters can wreak on a nation. 2018 was no better. These two years were the costliest on record for weather-related disasters in the United States, amounting to over $400 billion1 in damage. Perhaps even more daunting than this figure is the difficulty of determining how best to reduce it: natural hazard mitigation spending is not closely monitored, making it very difficult to track the efficacy of mitigation measures and thus hindering attempts to implement them.
With the goal of promoting mitigation efforts, the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS -
https://www.nibs.org) released its Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves: 2018 Interim Report in January 2019. This report, issued in collaboration with a consortium of federal agencies and other organiza- tions, quantifies the cost savings for implementing four sets of mitigation strategies, including: beyond code requirements (surpassing minimum building code requirements in new buildings set by the International Code Council (ICC - https://
www.iccsafe.org), adopting I-Code requirements (designing buildings with best-practice codes set by ICC), infrastructure (making water, wastewater, electricity, telecommunications, roads, and railroads utilities and transportation systems more resilient), and federal grants (provided by FEMA, EDA2, and HUD to strengthen existing buildings on state and community- wide scales). For these mitigation strategies, cost savings are determined for four natural hazards: riverine and coastal flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes, and fires at the wildland- urban interface (WUI).
The 2018 report builds on a widely used 2005 NIBS report
entitled Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves: An Independent Study to Assess the Future Savings from Mitigation Activities, which found that every $1 that FEMA invested in natural hazard mitigation between 1993 and 2003 saved $4 in future recovery costs. The 2005 report also found that $3.5 billion in mitigation spending will save society about $14 billion in future building repair costs, content losses, direct and indi- rect business interruption, deaths and nonfatal injuries, and environmental and historical value. The 2018 report provides
a more comprehen- sive assessment of the savings result- ing from mitiga- tion measures, and aggregates and compares them across national, state, and local lev- els. The 2018 report also has a broader focus, including ele- ments absent from the 2005 report, such as injury and loss of life, while also using advances in disaster model- ing to improve its precision.
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Wildfires, floods, hurricanes, torna- does: 2017 was no stranger to the full-forced havoc that natural disas- ters can wreak on a nation. 2018 was no better. These two years were the costliest on record...
NIBS quantifies savings using benefit-cost ratios (BCRs),
which compare the successes of mitigation measures to the cost of their implementation. Benefits include reductions in future deaths, household displacement, PTSD, loss of business revenue, and public and emergency facility damage. Higher BCRs reflect more cost-effective measures. The utility of this report reaches across sectors and scales, and may appeal to insurance companies, appraisers, architects, civil engineers, builders, government officials, homeowners, businesses, and universities.
Table 1 illustrates the BCRs for each hazard type and mitigation measure detailed in the NIBS report. Adopting I-Code requirements is the most cost-effective mitigation measure overall, showing particularly high returns for wind and earthquake hazards, for which highly effective building strategies have been developed in response to major events in the U.S. and internationally. Federal grants are the second most cost-effective measure: over a period of decades, effective implementation of federal grants is expected to save each state at least $10 million, with savings in more populous or hazard- prone states exceeding $1 billion. Hurricane surge is perhaps the most attractive hazard for future mitigation research,
1. Adam B. Smith, 2018’s Billion Dollar Disasters in Context, (NOAA, 2019), 1. 2. US Economic Development Agency.
14 TPG •
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www.aipg.org
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