Global Risk Identification Programme (GRIP)

Description

Project overview

Organisations active in disaster risk identification collaboratively decided to establish an inter-institutional framework to support and coordinate activities to promote a more systematic improvement and application of risk information. A global programme was created for assessing, identifying and analysing information on disaster risks and losses: the Global Risk Identification Programme (GRIP).

The GRIP was set up to offer a framework to support and guide two key parallel programmes of activities:

  • Loss Estimation to provide a more comprehensive and accurate accounting of disaster-related costs and losses (e.g. economic losses; relief costs, GLIDE implementation; disaster databases);
  • Risk Estimation to improve the availability of information and analysis on disaster risks and risk factors (e.g. hazard characterisation and data; vulnerability assessment; risk indexes).

Resulting data, methods and analyses are made available through a coordinated knowledge management programme intended to inform the design of disaster risk management and capacity building activities in high-risk countries.

The ProVention Consortium and UNDP undertook a preparatory phase during 2005-2006 to design a programme framework and outline of activities, identify participating partners and ascertain a feasible and appropriate governance and management structure for such an ambitious inter-institutional programme. Activities that took place during this first project phase included:

The concept and potential application of GRIP attracted wide interest and support.

The GRIP, now led by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), supports a broad set of projects to develop national risk atlases and disaster loss observatories in numerous countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2009 GRIP completed two projects which were supported by ProVention. The first was the development of a GRIP web portal to support capacity building for risk identification at the national level. The web portal includes an online toolbox and communities of practice for risk analysis experts in different countries and has facilitated the expansion of GRIP activities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. ProVention also supported risk research and data analysis used by UN/ISDR as a core component of the Global Assessment Report (GAR) on Disaster Risk Reduction, which focused in this first edition on the interface between poverty and disasters. As a further contribution to the GAR, ProVention also led the development of a practice review on innovations in risk financing for disaster risk management. The GAR was released in May 2009.

Partners

The preparatory phase was implemented by UNDP. A number of key organisations, including the World Bank, IADB, Columbia University, CRED, UNEP, OCHA Relief Web, the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, ADRC and LA RED, contributed in taking forward the GRIP idea to establish a formal programme and network.

Outputs & events

The Global Risk Identification Program launched its website in 2007: www.gripweb.org.

Links

Useful resources

Significant progress has been made by the international community in recent years in improving the quality and accuracy of global disaster data collection, in developing indicators and indexes of disaster risk and in developing tools and methods for assessing disaster risk at the different spatial levels.

Important initiatives have been launched, both within the framework of ISDR Working Group III and with the support of the ProVention Consortium, involving a wide range of international and regional organisations and academic institutes. These include the UNDP/UNEP Disaster Risk Index, ProVention World Bank/Columbia University Disaster Risk Hotspots Project, Inter-American Development Bank Indicators of Disaster Risk Management in the Americas, the Global unique disaster identifier number (GLIDE) initiative and the ongoing development of global and national disaster loss databases, such as CRED EM-DAT and DesInventar.

The risk analysis resource section on this website aims to document the key resources available in the field of risk analysis and application developed by the ProVention Consortium and its partners.