Who should pay for the next major terrorist attack? In a world under budgetary pressure, where huge sums of private and public fiscal resources have been mobilized to cope with the financial crisis and a series of unprecedented natural and man-made disasters, governments and enterprises are not eager to assume more risks. Yet, when economic [...]
This technological and environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico illustrates the increasing degree of interdependence in today’s world. In financial terms, this means that numbers of organizations not only mis-manage their risks internally, but impose the negative consequences on others outside (notion of security externalities introduced in the book Seeds of Disaster, Roots of [...]
This article also appeared in the Huffington Post (April 28, 2010) —–
Five years ago, the United States was reeling from the destruction caused by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma, and by the four other hurricanes that made landfall the year before. These extreme events caused historical human and economic consequences. Developing America’s resiliency to the [...]
” The earthquake in Haiti is an omen for what the new decade has in store. We will see more natural disasters, and of larger scale, in the coming years. The trend is already accelerating: more than half of the planet’s 20 costliest catastrophes since 1970 have occurred since 2001. Because of the world’s quickly [...]
8.8 magnitude earthquake (understand hundreds times more intense than the January 2010 7.0 quake in Haiti) occurred on February 27, 2010 in Chile.
Although many thought in the following hours after the quake hit that “only” thousands could have been killed, it is now clear that hundreds of thousands died in what remains one of the most devastating catastrophes to hit this small country of 9 million people. The lack of preparedness and coordination of crisis management capacities [...]
TIME magazine recently declared “00’s: Decade from Hell”. For those of us who have been focusing on catastrophe-related topics, the years 2000-2009 have certainly been extraordinary. While many countries, citizens and corporations shared the burden of the decade’s extreme events, America has been hit on almost every front in the past 10 years: [...]
Many impending crises are on the agenda this month …
Climate is clearly one of them, with the international conference on climate change in Copenhagen started in just a few weeks. Here we might end up not being as successful in reaching a consensus as the media has suggested in the past 2 or 3 [...]