Context
Since 1950, disasters have affected around 9.2 million people in the Pacific region, caused 9,811 reported deaths and cost the Pacific Island Countries some USD 3.2 billion in nominal terms in associated damage costs (EM-DAT, 2010).
Goals
The Pacific Catastrophe Risk Assessment and Financing Initiative aimed to provide the Pacific Island Countries with disaster risk modelling and assessment tools. It also aimed to engage in a dialogue with them on integrated financial solutions for the reduction of their financial vulnerability to natural disasters and to climate change. The initiative was part of the broader agenda on disaster risk management and climate change adaptation in the Pacific region.
Additionally, the Pacific Disaster Risk Assessment Project provided 15 countries with disaster risk assessment tools to help them better understand, model and assess their exposure to natural disasters.
Outputs
Pacific disaster risk assessment
- Probabilistic assessment of major perils
- The Pacific Risk Information System (PacRIS)
- A risk-based framework to direct the resources of countries and development partners
Pacific disaster risk financing solutions
- Fiscal risk exposure
- Financial disaster risk management
- Regional risk pooling
Models and data
PCRAFI assembled, processed, developed and organised the largest collection of geo-referenced data for hazard modelling in the region:
- Satellite imagery
- Topographic maps
- Bathymetry maps
- Surface geology maps
- Surface soil maps
- Land cover and land use maps
- Geodetic and fault data
- Historical catalogues of tropical cyclones and earthquakes
From that base it produced detailed probabilistic hazard models for all 15 countries: tropical cyclones with wind, storm surge and rain; and earthquakes with ground shaking and tsunami.
Where Samoa fitted in
Written for this archive: Samoa sits on the boundary between the Pacific and Australian plates and in the track of the South Pacific cyclone season, which is why the national node carried both earthquake and tropical cyclone hazard layers rather than one or the other. The exposure databases published alongside them — buildings, cash crops, special infrastructure — are what turn a hazard map into a loss estimate, and they are the part of the catalogue that took the most work to assemble.