HOW NATURAL HAZARD RISK ASSESSMENTS CAN BENEFIT FROM ENTERPRISE RISK MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVES

Current methods for assessing risks posed by earthquake and many weather-related hazards may be appropriate to inform decision makers, citizens, and other stakeholders of likely future impacts. However, current methods for assessing landslide and volcanic risks appear to be insufficient. The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency's National Risk Index (NRI) consist of ten weather, four weather-triggered, one earthquake-triggered, and three geologic hazards. Earthquake and some weather-related hazards include regional design requirements for acceptable building performance and accurate forecasting is available for evacuation in advance of extreme weather. Teams of engineers and scientists examine building- and infrastructure-performance following major earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. Lessons learned from such performance reviews become integrated into subsequent building-code versions. Landslides are viewed as local hazards because damage is controlled by topographic, geologic, and land-use details, and building codes, based on a "stable site" concept, have no design provisions for ground deformation. Therefore, post-landslide observations tend to focus on ground deformation without considering building performance or resilience. Volcanic activity has a wide range of possible effects, from relatively tranquil flow of fluid lava to violent eruption of vapor and ash, with or without solid blocks or liquid blebs. The NRI considers volcanic effects only in close proximity to volcanic sources; consequently, damaging effects of volcanic ash from the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens in southwest Washington were not considered even though the ash hazard footprint extended from southern Colorado to northwest Minnesota.

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is a systematic risk management framework for identifying, analyzing, responding to, and controlling internal and external sources of risk to a business enterprise, including ransomware. Considering all possible natural hazard effects at a site from an ERM site-location perspective could be as beneficial as performing Potential Failure Mode Analyses (PFMA) or Semi-Quantitative Risk Analyses (SQRA) for high-hazard facilities. Properly trained geologists are well suited to lead natural hazard analysis tasks of this type.