Catastrophe risk management firm RMS has teamed with 100 Resilient Cities—Pioneered by The Rockefeller Foundation (100RC) in a partnership that will allow cities in the 100RC network to access the RMS(one) exposure and risk management platform as well as RMS catastrophe models to help them manage and mitigate natural hazard risk.

RMS has joined a Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Commitment to Action through the partnership with 100RC, pledging to address this global challenge.

100RC aims to help 100 cities around the world build resilience to catastrophic events as well as chronic stresses such as climate change. It is providing cities with funding to hire a chief resilience officer, assistance in the implementation of a resilience strategy, and access to technology and expertise from a select platform of partners.

RMS technology can help the cities:

• Develop high-quality data on exposures. Cities can use the RMS(one) platform to establish a system of record for all data on property, people and infrastructure exposed to natural hazards, enabling consistent assumptions and availability of data for all risk assessment projects as well as systematic improvement of the data over time.
• Improve understanding of risk. By building and running catastrophe models to simulate expected damage and other impacts from plausible future events, cities can identify key drivers of risk by geography, type of building or other factors.
• Prioritize mitigation investments. Cities can test hypothetical scenarios to quantify the impact of potential investments in changing building codes, implementing retrofit programs or improving infrastructure.
• Communicate risk. Armed with data and analysis, cities can more effectively share information on exposures and risks to motivate communities to prepare for natural hazards.
• Measure progress. With consistent and easily updatable information on all exposures, cities can regularly refresh their risk assessments to reflect achievements in improving the building stock as well as growth in overall exposures to measure progress over time.
• Analyze risk-financing schemes. Assessing the expected frequency of various levels of financial loss to public buildings and infrastructure enables cities to evaluate potential mechanisms to finance disaster response and rebuilding costs from future events.
• Respond to disasters. By capturing all exposure information and modeling assumptions in the RMS(one) platform, cities can rapidly quantify expected damage after a catastrophe and prioritize allocation of resources.

San Francisco will be the first city in the 100RC program to take advantage of RMS models and technology.

Source: RMS