**6. Discussion and concluding remarks**

552 Risk Management – Current Issues and Challenges

*Agriculture Emergency Announcements* 

*Budget Availability for Emergencies* 

water supply and its effects on agriculture activities.

*Early Warning System* 

The public risk management initiatives implemented by the Chilean organizations involve one or several of the following mechanisms. While excellent initiatives, some of them can

Chile possesses a modern early warning system that is able to detect and send alerts about natural disasters. It uses information produced by the Dirección Meteorológica de Chile (DMC), Dirección de Obras Hidráulicas (DOH), Dirección General de Aguas (DGA), Servicio Hidrográfico y Oceanográfico de la Armada (SHOA) and others. The Ministry of Agriculture via its Regional Centers for Agro-meteorological Information interacts with the climate information providers and generates tailored products for the corresponding sector.

The Agriculture Emergency Zone (ZEA, in Spanish) announcements for droughts are fast and the corresponding institutional instances are efficient. However, the criteria used for announcing the ZEAs, which is based on the agriculture impact, may require modifications. The impacts are assessed in terms of a combination of factors: e.g. losses reported by a technical organism, request of a local authority and help requests from affected farmers. Specifically, ZEA announcements may require a criteria homogenization for both monitoring the evolution of the drought, as well as the emergency declaration itself. The announcement must adjust to regional realities and take into consideration the potable

Even when the budget allocation for emergencies is normally made through the utilization of funds already directed to other activities, in the last years, there has been an increasing amount of money in Chile properly directed to environmental emergencies. For instance, the emergency drought budget made available for the 2007-2008 case enabled the development of a higher number of implemented policies. In the Ministry of Agriculture, different mechanisms (e.g. emergency bonds, accident benefits, livestock health operations, agriculture emergency employment programs and a special incentive fund program for the

A final comment can be included here about the implementation of an additional system to monitor the success of the risk management process in Chile. Presently there is neither an evaluation of the loss levels associated with a drought, nor an *ex post* diagnostic of the implementation mechanisms. It is necessary to possess adequate metrics to assess the effectiveness of applied strategies and the recovery of the affected populations. It is important to develop and to implement a protocol for the evaluation of the impacts of droughts. In addition, this will help with emergency management policies and the development of *ad hoc* prevention and mitigation measures focused on the vulnerability reduction of certain territories. A continuously updated registration of the users and affected people during an emergency is also required; this information will help to project

recovery of degraded soils) were able to take care of around 161,000 beneficiaries.

still be further improved. Some suggestions are pointed out in those cases.

Nonetheless, these products do not always arrive on time to the farmers.

The Latin American Observatory partnership has been able to improve several aspects of the way decision-making tools are created and provided to stakeholders and end-mile users in different institution of Latin America in the past years, increasing the dissemination of available services for assessing and –when possible- forecasting hazards and vulnerabilities. This allows advisement of authorities in taking the right course of action in order to protect human populations from the direct or indirect effects of hazards.

In this chapter, we have presented the general methodologies that are used in the OLE2 for risk assessment and management, along with a few case studies for different countries. The main innovation is related to the way the partnership interacts to share data, products, experiences, helping institutions with lesser human resources and capacities to take advantage of the strengths of other partners, but also sharing efforts at a regional level so the work is divided among a greater number of experts, even when they don't belong to a certain institute, or even when they are not present in the same country. This interdependence has proven a key component of the long-term sustainability of the Observatory.

In terms of the methods employed, important learned lessons arise in relation to the use of probability maps when working with vulnerabilities, hazards and risk management. A probability approach involves the consideration of the related uncertainties of every step of the methodology, which are always present in this kind of analysis. This introduces an *a priori* spectrum of possible immediate actions to decision-makers, even if the real intensity of the hazard is not known until the moment of the emergency. The whole system is aimed at improving the response times and also benefit/cost ratios.

Providing services that take into consideration different scales (e.g. interannual to decadal to climate change scales, as well as from basins to nation-wide to continental scales) and the evolution in time of both hazard and vulnerability probabilities has proven in our experience to be a more adequate practice when assessing and managing risk.

The recognition of the local chains of dissemination of the information, institutional relationships and their adequate use and promotion instead of creating new ones is another lesson learned. The Observatory as a "boundary institution" is paying special attention to these issues and also to the importance of "translating" methods and products so the final services can not only be adequately understood but also be properly assimilated by decision-makers and stakeholders.

Finally, there is an increasingly growing culture on risk assessment and management in LAC, but as Baethgen has pointed out recently [31], it is also important to consider the benefits that may arise if there is also preparedness to take advantage of probable "positive" natural events (e.g. a natural event may be a hazard for certain sectors of production, but may be positive for others). The Observatory must therefore consider also Opportunity Assessment and Management policies in the near future to address such profitable scenarios.

Risk Management at the Latin American Observatory 555

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