Benchmarking Vulnerability

 

The Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), with the assistance of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), in 2007 developed a comprehensive Vulnerability Benchmarking Tool (BTool) to “assist OECS countries to proactively plan and implement actions to reduce vulnerability to natural disasters and create greater economic resilience when they do occur”. The BTool allows for the following:

 

• Evaluation of the adequacy of current disaster risk management tools;

• Evaluation of the readiness and capability of local national institutions to deal with the risk of disaster;

• Best practice recommendations for disaster risk management;

• Regional benchmarking of nations and programs.

 

 

Benefits:

 

• It provides a snapshot of a country’s exposure to natural disaster;

• It can be used to build support for the allocation of resources to reduce risk in defined areas;

• It can be used to prioritize national and regional programs of activities;

• It can be used as an incentive at the political level to stimulate action due to the comparative nature of its scores against another country;

• It provides information, in a consistent manner, on the state of readiness of each country.

 

The Vulnerability Benchmarking Tool, which is a comprehensive, objective and relatively simple to use instrument, is based on the Inter-American Development Bank’s (IADB) construct of risk management as comprising (a) risk identification, (b) risk mitigation, (c) risk transfer, (d) disaster preparedness, (e) emergency response, and (f) rehabilitation and reconstruction. Consequently, it provides an assessment of the country’s performance across each of these six indices.

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The Evidence Base for Building Resilience

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The international development community has Identified and defined evidence-based sector best-practices that align with, and support, low carbon emissions development and the Global Goals. The following documents should serve to guide the resilience agenda:

• The Sustainable Development Goals

• The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction

• The Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change

• The National Energy Plan (2010)

• The Climate Change Adaptation Policy (2015)