Retrospective assessment of risk from natural hazards

Disaster databases allow analyzing losses produced by previous events and assessing the risk from natural hazard in a similar way the insurance industry does for vehicles, health, etc., if the conditions and trends are maintained. Among the existing disaster databases, we selected DesInventar, whose vast majority of records corresponds to “small” events; this selection is of special interest as these small events are often ignored because, individually, they only stroke a few assets accounting for low economic losses. Nevertheless, their accumulated effect can have a significant impact over the economic and fiscal sustainability of urban areas, regions or countries. Also, the results from this approach cannot be obtained elsewhere, especially considering the difficulties involved in assessing risk for those small disasters, including the lack of general models and the elevated susceptibility to local variables of the results, this approach can provide answers so far unavailable. The methodology herein proposed has been applied to the assessment of risk (in the terms of the loss exceedance curve) in 23 countries.