Interview with Jeroen Aerts, coordinator of the ENHANCE project
Jeroen Aerts of the Institute for Environmental Studies at VU University Amsterdam explained what ENHANCE set out to do: build new partnerships to reduce or redistribute natural-hazard risk, with insurers in a central role.
Jeroen Aerts of the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) at VU University Amsterdam coordinated ENHANCE. In this introductory interview he described the project’s aim as developing new multi-sector partnerships that reduce natural-hazard risk or redistribute it, with a key role for insurers.
The challenge he named was growth under uncertainty. Natural-hazard risk will rise with socio-economic trends and with climate change, and nobody can say exactly by how much. Partnerships therefore have to be flexible, and they need tools that support decisions under uncertainty rather than tools that assume a single forecast.
The method was participatory. Ten case studies covered heat waves, forest fires, floods, drought, storm surge and volcanic eruptions, and the science was driven by the cases and their stakeholders rather than the other way round. Each case was developed with regional stakeholders from the outset. Aerts named UNISDR as a key partner that gave feedback on the work.
His closing point was the one the project kept returning to. A partnership succeeds when its members share an understanding of the risks they face and of the instruments proposed to deal with them. Without that shared picture, an insurer, a ministry and a municipality can sit at the same table and still be talking about different problems.
The project’s formal aims are set out in the objectives record, the consortium in the partners list, and the ten cases in the case-study atlas. Aerts discussed his own research on New York in a second interview.