The ENHANCE Project 2012–2016: news, interviews, events

ENHANCE, short for “Enhancing risk management partnerships for catastrophic natural hazards in Europe”, was a research project funded under the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, in its environment strand. It ran for 48 months, from 1 December 2012 to 30 November 2016, under grant agreement 308438. According to CORDIS, the European Commission’s research database, its total cost was EUR 7,687,123, of which the EU contributed EUR 5,992,084.

The project was coordinated by IVM, the Institute for Environmental Studies at VU University Amsterdam, with Jeroen Aerts as project coordinator and Ralph Lasage as project manager. Its consortium listed 24 partners from 11 countries: universities and research institutes, a UN office, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, a reinsurance broker, a water utility, a railway consultancy, a regional environment agency and a coastal stakeholder forum. ARCTIK, a Belgian environmental communications firm, handled communication and dissemination.

The question it set itself was practical. Europe’s losses from natural hazards were rising, and the existing arrangements for sharing them, between insurers, governments, the EU and the people affected, were patchy and often improvised. ENHANCE tried to develop what it called multi-sector partnerships: arrangements in which public bodies, private companies and civil society share the work and cost of reducing risk. It tested the idea in ten case studies, from volcanic ash over Iceland to drought in the Júcar basin, which are introduced on the case-study atlas. Its formal reports and papers are collected in the document library.

What follows is the project’s public record in date order: news, interviews, events, media pages and the reference pages on its partners, links and objectives.

News, 2013–2016

ENHANCE’s news output was busiest in March 2015, when ENHANCE partners attended the Third UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, Japan, and wrote a letter a day. Outside that week the items covered consultation responses, case-study results and, at the end, the launch of the final book. Dates below are the publication dates of each item.

• 2 October 2013: ENHANCE response to the Commission’s Green Paper on the insurance of natural and man-made disasters
• 29 August 2014: Aviation colour code goes red over the Bárðarbunga eruption site
• 20 January 2015: ENHANCE video released
• 16 February 2015: UN drafts targets to cut disaster-induced losses by 2030
• 15 March 2015: Letters from Sendai, no. 1: the conference opens
• 15 March 2015: Letters from Sendai, no. 2: risk assessment
• 17 March 2015: Letters from Sendai, no. 3: partnerships and insurance
• 17 March 2015: Letters from Sendai, no. 4: the economics of risk reduction
• 17 March 2015: Letters from Sendai, no. 5: the triple resilience dividend
• 18 March 2015: Letters from Sendai, no. 6: stalemate in the negotiations
• 18 March 2015: Letters from Sendai, no. 7: insurance incentives for risk reduction
• 20 March 2015: Letters from Sendai, no. 8: the Sendai Framework is adopted
• 20 March 2015: Letters from Sendai, no. 9: reflection on the targets
• 23 March 2015: Letters from Sendai: the collected letters
• 9 February 2016: Debate on insurance and climate adaptation at a DG CLIMA workshop
• 6 May 2016: Port of Rotterdam: a partnership for risk reduction
• 31 October 2016: The ENHANCE book on multi-sector partnerships is published
• 10 November 2016: Multi-sector partnerships key in disaster risk reduction, press release
• 25 November 2016: Study calls for better public health responses to heatwaves in Belgium and the Netherlands

The Sendai letters are the most readable part of the record. Swenja Surminski of the London School of Economics opened the series on 14 March 2015, noting that more than 5,000 officials from over 160 countries were expected and that prevention was chronically underfunded compared with relief. Reinhard Mechler of IIASA reported from the session on the economics of risk reduction. Jaroslav Mysiak of FEEM described a stalemate over aid and international cooperation with one day of talks left. Annegret Thieken of the University of Potsdam wrote up the adoption of the Sendai Framework after a closing session that ran to almost midnight on 18 March. The last letter, signed jointly, judged the outcome weaker than hoped: none of the seven targets set a quantitative degree of progress, and most were framed as global rather than country-level outcomes.

Two items stand slightly apart. The February 2015 piece on draft UN targets was a news report first published by the Japan Times from a Kyodo story, reproduced as background before the conference. And the 2014 item on Bárðarbunga is the only one about a live event, when the Icelandic Meteorological Office raised the aviation colour code to red over a fissure eruption north of Vatnajökull; it pointed readers to the volcanic ash case study, now the Iceland volcano case study.

Editorials and interviews

The editorials were interviews rather than opinion pieces: partners explaining their case studies, and senior figures from the UN, the European Commission and the insurance industry giving their view of disaster risk policy. None of them carries a date. The timing given below comes from what each interview refers to and from the e-news alert that announced it, so it is approximate.

• Around 2014: Jeroen Aerts on flood resilience strategies for coastal megacities, on his Science paper about New York
• Around 2014: Swenja Surminski on the London flood case study, when Flood Re was still a proposal
• Around 2014: Margareta Wahlström, UN Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, ahead of the Sendai conference
• Late 2014: Swenja Surminski at the Geneva Association seminar on extreme events, New York, October 2014
• By January 2015: Andreas Schöbel of OpenTrack Railway Technology, on Alpine rail resilience
• By January 2015: Steve Jewson of Risk Management Solutions, on access to hazard data
• Early March 2015: Jaroslav Mysiak of FEEM, on the case studies and the coming Sendai conference
• Around March 2016: Christos Stylianides, EU Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management
• By mid-2016: Birgit Gerkensmeier of Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, on the Wadden Sea storm-surge case

Two earlier interviews stand on their own:

• Early in the project: Interview with Jeroen Aerts, the coordinator’s introduction to ENHANCE and its ten case studies
• 2013–2014: Interview with Paola Albrito, head of the UNISDR Regional Office for Europe, on the UN office’s role in the project

Read together, the interviews show a consistent thread. Surminski said in 2014 that the link between risk transfer and physical risk reduction was weak in practice. Jewson, from the catastrophe-modelling side, contrasted open public data in the United States with fee-based access in the UK and France, and called better data access the key to risk assessment. Stylianides, in 2016, cited a rise in average annual disaster losses in Europe from about EUR 9 billion in the 1980s to more than EUR 13 billion in the 2000s and called the uptake of disaster insurance low. Wahlström pointed out that the private sector accounts for most new investment globally, so private decisions shape most new risk. The project’s case for partnerships rested on exactly these points.

Events

The project’s events calendar listed conferences and forums relevant to disaster risk, not ENHANCE’s own meetings. Most entries were short listings with dates, a venue and a link to the organiser. One of them has a record here.

• 30 June to 4 July 2014: Understanding Risk 2014: Producing Actionable Information, the Understanding Risk Forum at University College London

The listing gave the dates, the venue and the organiser’s web address, and embedded a video from the 2012 forum. It did not describe any ENHANCE role. Events where ENHANCE partners did speak, such as the Sendai conference in March 2015 and the DG CLIMA insurance workshop in February 2016, are covered in the news items above.

Media items

The project’s media pages were addressed to journalists, stakeholders and the public, and offered background material rather than news. Six of its pages have records here:

• Visual identity and copyrights: guidelines for using the ENHANCE logo and case-study images, with a request to credit photographers
• Press review: articles and reports that mentioned ENHANCE, including a UNISDR annual report on disaster resilience in Europe and an interview with the Portuguese partners in the magazine Água & Ambiente
• Press contact: the contact point at ARCTIK for press questions
• Articles and reports: journal papers by project authors in Science and Nature Climate Change, among others
• E-news alerts: the six newsletters sent between July 2014 and March 2016
• The ENHANCE book: the final book, “Novel Multi-Sector Partnerships in Disaster Risk Management: Results of the ENHANCE project”, published in late 2016

The press review is the best guide to how far the project’s work travelled. The UNISDR report it listed put Europe’s ten-year average disaster losses at USD 13.4 billion and called Europe the third most affected region. The Wadden Sea Forum ran a project profile, and a German-language article covered a flood-insurance workshop held at Munich Re. The articles page, for its part, shows where the project’s researchers published: a Science paper on flood resilience for coastal megacities and two Nature Climate Change papers in 2014 on disaster-risk finance and on managing the risk of climate extremes. Full references with DOIs are in the document library.

Partners

The consortium counted 24 partners from 11 countries. The partner list itself has 25 rows, because ARCTIK appears twice, once on its own and once paired with EBN, the Innovation Network. The partners, as printed, were:

• IVM, Institute for Environmental Studies, VU University Amsterdam (Netherlands), coordinator
• FEEM, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (Italy)
• HZG, Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht (Germany)
• IIASA, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (Austria)
• LSE, London School of Economics and Political Science (United Kingdom)
• UNISDR, the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (Switzerland)
• UCL, Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium)
• EBN, Innovation Network (Belgium)
• ARCTIK SPRL, environmental communication (Belgium)
• JRC, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (listed under Belgium)
• UPVLC, Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain)
• ISA-CEABN, Instituto Superior de Agronomia (Portugal)
• ASE, Bucharest University of Economic Studies (Romania)
• HI, Háskóli Íslands, the University of Iceland (Iceland)
• UP, University of Potsdam (Germany)
• ClimateWise, University of Cambridge (United Kingdom)
• University of Oxford (United Kingdom)
• Willis Limited (United Kingdom)
• Empresa Mixta Valenciana de Aguas (Spain)
• OpenTrack Railway Technology (Austria)
• Perspectives (Germany)
• ARPA Emilia-Romagna, the regional environmental protection agency (Italy)
• Wadden Sea Forum (Germany)
• Metacortex (Portugal)
• HKV Consultants (Netherlands)

The partners page lists them with their countries. The mix is unusual for an EU research consortium. Next to the universities sat a reinsurance broker (Willis), an insurance-industry climate initiative (ClimateWise), a water utility in Valencia, a railway software company and a coastal forum, which reflects the project’s premise that the people who carry a risk should be in the room when it is studied.

Links and objectives

Two reference pages completed the project’s public face.

The links page pointed to the international bodies most relevant to disaster risk reduction: UNISDR and its PreventionWeb platform, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (ECHO), the World Meteorological Organization and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. Each came with a one-line description.

The objectives page set out four aims. The first was to identify what makes a partnership succeed or fail and how new ones can be fostered. The second was to develop harmonised methods and scenarios for assessing risk, especially from low-probability events. The third was to test which economic instruments, insurance arrangements and policies work for partnerships. The fourth was to produce guidelines and policy recommendations for building risk management and climate-proofing into other policies. The method was participatory throughout: partnerships were to be designed with the people involved, in ten case studies at different scales across Europe, covering heat waves, forest fires, floods, drought, storm surges and volcanic eruptions.

The final book, published in October 2016, claimed ten partnerships set up or developed. That number is the project’s own count. The two outcomes it named, a Wadden Sea Forum plan to add climate change to its work and roughly EUR 200,000 committed by Rotterdam’s port authority, city and the Dutch infrastructure ministry for further climate-risk analysis of the port, are the ones that can be pinned to a place and a sum.