Review, redefinition and development of disaster risk indices to rank countries for international organizations

Disasters are increasing continuously in the world and so is the risk. For a growing exposure of people and economy, the threats of natural disasters are ominous and ever present ones. The year 2011 has already seen some of the most deadly and devastating disasters like earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand, floods in Pakistan, Australia and Brazil, droughts in East Africa and cyclone “Irene” in United States. Damages are evident but the risk factors that converted these hazards into the disasters are mostly invisible to the public, governments and even to the disaster management and development professionals. It is the need of the future to understand risk and define the policy and strategies to take appropriate actions for disaster risk mitigation. Risk Indices and indicator systems help to identify and bridge the existing gap, prioritize the cost effective actions and to assess the performance of risk management practices in future. An attempt has been made to review the four different (DRI, Hotspots, Americas Program and ENSURE) existing standard methodologies of risk index systems and to identify the most coherent one. As Local Disaster Index (LDI) of Americas Project provides the dispersion of risk at local scale instead of measuring risk at local level, a separate index complementing to Local Disaster Index and measuring the risk at local scale is developed. Prevalent Vulnerability Index (PVI) is redefined to make it more realistic and relevant to the need. Three countries (Chile, Colombia and El Salvador) are taken as pilot countries to analyze the different methodologies. A critical analysis of the issues affecting the disaster risk management has been done and suggestions are given to improve the indicator systems. This work is aimed to prove future guidelines in the development of risk index and associated indicators.