**5. Cases of study**

540 Risk Management – Current Issues and Challenges

extremely helpful.

Goddard *et al.* [9])

the associated hazards. Nonetheless, the probability density function associated with hazards in equation (1) is frequently computed from time series that may contain useful information at different time scales. Given the fact that a decision maker might be interested in a certain time scale (e.g. on the order of its own managerial period), a temporal decomposition of the original time series used to identify the hazard probability may be

For example, Figure 3 presents such time-scale decomposition for Southeast South America's precipitation. The lower panels sketch the non-linear long-term trend (a proxy for climate change), and decadal and interannual variability time series [9]. The rationale is that in considering the interaction of the three climate signals (the explained variance being a way to ponder the specific weight of each one of them) it is possible to provide better climate services

to decision-makers, that are more adequate for their scale of interest, e.g. next 10 years.

**Figure 3.** Decomposition for Southeast South America's precipitation (boxed region) for three different time scales: long-term trend (left panel), decadal variability (central panel) and interannual variability (right panel), with their respective explained variance (colors in the map and values in the bottom corner of each time series). Grid boxes in white are not statistically significant at a p-level=0.95. (After

As mentioned before, hazards and vulnerabilities are not independent. The latter encompasses exposure to hazards, sensitivity to these hazards and adaptive capacity. All of them, in fact, evolve in time. Therefore, a similar multi-scale time decomposition must also be done to correctly assess the related vulnerabilities. This provides a more realistic risk

probability distribution, and thus better assessments and policies can be developed.

In this section a few state-of-the-art examples of risk assessment and management in several countries in Latin America are briefly described. Signatory and participant institutions of the Latin American Observatory operate over these structures, providing tailored methodologies based on what has been explained in previous sections.
