This book examines the role of the private sector in emergency management and how that role is changing through private sector intersections with government, government agencies, and the public sectors in all phases of emergency management. It particularly focuses on the areas in which government regulations and guidelines promote or encourage priv
This book draws upon case studies and practices of different types of DRR involvement by the private sector from all over the world. The book comprises two parts, Part I: Overview and Regional Cases; and Part II: Country Cases. The regional cases include those from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Central America, and the country cases include ones from India, Japan, the United States, Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Nepal. DRR at the international level is discussed from the perspective of the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR). The perspective of the Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) is presented in the discussion of DRR at the societal level. The private sector is becoming more active in disaster management and plays an important role in distributing relief items and sending search and rescue teams in the response phase. However, once the response stage is over, private sector involvement tends to fade. While a number of disaster risk reduction (DRR) initiatives by the private sector are documented, they remain limited. The private sector can contribute enormously to DRR by developing business continuity plans, innovating technology for early warning systems, and providing and sharing technical knowledge, skills, and resources in the field of disaster preparedness. To strengthen DRR capacity, it is crucial to involve the private sector as major actors in DRR. The primary target groups for this book are students and researchers in the fields of disaster management and DRR studies. Another target group comprises practitioners and policy makers, who will be able to apply the collective knowledge from this work to policy and decision making. The book provides an overview of the current research trends and furnishes basic knowledge on this important topic.
Disasters tend to cross political, jurisdictional, functional, and geographic boundaries. As a result, disasters often require responses from multiple levels of government and multiple organizations in the public and private sectors. This means that public and private organizations that normally operate independently must work together to mount an effective disaster response. To identify and understand approaches to aligning health care system incentives with the American public's need for a health care system that is prepared to manage acutely ill and injured patients during a disaster, public health emergency, or other mass casualty event, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine hosted a 2-day public workshop on March 20 and 21, 2018. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11) on the United States prompted a rethinking of how the United States prepares for disasters. Federal policy documents written since 9/11 have stressed that the private and public sectors share equal responsibility for the security of the nation's critical infrastructure and key assets. Private sector entities have a role in the safety, security, and resilience of the communities in which they operate. Incentivizing the private sector to expend resources on community efforts remains challenging. Disasters in the United States since 9/11 (e.g., Hurricane Katrina in 2005) indicate that the nation has not yet been successful in making its communities resilient to disaster. In this book, the National Research Council assesses the current states of the art and practice in private-public sector collaboration dedicated to strengthening community disaster resilience.
Natural disasters-including hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods-caused more than 220,000 deaths worldwide in the first half of 2010 and wreaked havoc on homes, buildings, and the environment. To withstand and recover from natural and human-caused disasters, it is essential that citizens and communities work together to anticipate threats, limit their effects, and rapidly restore functionality after a crisis. Increasing evidence indicates that collaboration between the private and public sectors could improve the ability of a community to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. Several previous National Research Council reports have identified specific examples of the private and public sectors working cooperatively to reduce the effects of a disaster by implementing building codes, retrofitting buildings, improving community education, or issuing extreme-weather warnings. State and federal governments have acknowledged the importance of collaboration between private and public organizations to develop planning for disaster preparedness and response. Despite growing ad hoc experience across the country, there is currently no comprehensive framework to guide private-public collaboration focused on disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. Building Community Disaster Resilience through Private-Public Collaboration assesses the current state of private-public sector collaboration dedicated to strengthening community resilience, identifies gaps in knowledge and practice, and recommends research that could be targeted for investment. Specifically, the book finds that local-level private-public collaboration is essential to the development of community resilience. Sustainable and effective resilience-focused private-public collaboration is dependent on several basic principles that increase communication among all sectors of the community, incorporate flexibility into collaborative networks, and encourage regular reassessment of collaborative missions, goals, and practices.
The objective of this dissertation is to provide insights to better understand how public and private partnerships (PPPs) play an important role in ensuring that private incentives are aligned with public policies. This dissertation applies game theory, and optimization models to study the best public and private resource allocation strategies in disaster preparedness with the considerations of the uncertain consequences of the disasters, investment costs, and the decision makers' risk preferences. It provides insights into understanding (a) how to construct optimal public and private partnerships when the qualitative human behaviors and quantitative risk factors are considered; and (b) under what conditions and to what extent the public and private investments in preparedness could form better PPPs. This dissertation includes four parts. The first part (Chapter 2) reviews the previous research on the topics of operations research, game theory, disaster management, decision making methods under uncertainty, and Monte Carlo analytic hierarchy process. In the second part (Chapter 3), three approaches are explored to model the private sector's risk behavior in studying the PPPs with single private sector and single public sector. Using an expected present value approach, efficient PPPs are studied in disaster preparedness using a decentralized model (sequential game where the public sector is the first mover) and a centralized model. This approach identifies the best public investment policies by evaluating the effectiveness of incentive provisions based on the various private strategic responses. We study the conditions of the private and public sectors' resource allocation strategies when they are strategic complements or substitutes. We find that the private sector who has a higher valued target or lives in more risky areas invests more, and has higher potential to partner with the public sector. We also compare the decentralized model results with the results of the centralized model to study the efficiency of the PPPs and find that the results are similar when the target valuation or the probability of disasters is small. In an expected utility theory approach, we obtain the analytical model results when the private sector's risk preference is risk neutral, and provide the numerical model solutions when the private sector's risk behaviors are risk averse and risk seeking. We compare the private sector's best response and the SPNE solutions when the private sector is risk averse, risk neutral or risk seeking. Our results show that the public sector provides the less amount of subsidy to the risk-averse private sector, and provides the highest amount of subsidy to the risk-seeking private sector. The amount of subsidy provided to the risk-neutral private sector is in between the previous two cases. We also find that the private investments of the risk-seeking private sector, the risk-neutral private sector, and the risk-averse private sector are in the reverse order of the public subsidy. We also study a psychologically more accurate description decision analysis approach that models the real-life decision making under risk: prospect theory approach. We obtain the private sector's best response and the SPNE solution numerically, and conduct the sensitivity analysis of the model results. From the analysis, we find that the public sector provides more subsidy to the private sector if the public sector's target valuation is high; and the private sector is more risk seeking. We also find that the private sector has higher potential to partner with the public sector if the private sector has a higher valued target; is more sensitive to loss; or locates in a higher risk area. The third part (Chapter 4) extends the PPPs with single private decision maker and single public decision maker to the PPPs with single public sector engaging with multiple private sectors. Both quantitative and qualitative optimization models are proposed in this part to study how the public sector distributes the public subsidy to multiple private sectors, and partners with them. In the quantitative optimization model, we study the PPPs under both risk neutral model and prospect theory model in a sequential game. The algorithms are provided to solve for the equilibrium solutions. In the qualitative optimization model, an extensive research is conducted to determine the criteria of evaluating the private sectors. A multiple criteria decision making method, Monte Carlo analytic hierarchy process approach (MCAHP) is introduced to rank the private partners based on the criteria. Algorithm is also provided to solve the numerical solutions for both public and private sectors. The fourth part (Chapter 5) conducts model validation through an experiment with two stages. A graphical user interface (GUI) software is developed to conduct experiments for testing the decision maker's risk behavior and validating the model results (the private sector's best response). There are Forty-one students from the State University of New York at Buffalo participated in the experiment. By analyzing the median data of the first part of the experiment, we find that the participants behave risk seeking in the negative prospect, risk averse in the positive prospect, are sensitive to loss (loss aversion), overestimate the low probability and underestimate the moderate and high probability as the descriptions of the prospect theory. We also compare the second part of the experiment results with the model results. We find that the experiment results are consistent with our model prediction results.
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Subcommittee on Emergency Management, Intergovernmental Relations, and the District of Columbia
In the devastation that follows a major disaster, there is a need for multiple sectors to unite and devote new resources to support the rebuilding of infrastructure, the provision of health and social services, the restoration of care delivery systems, and other critical recovery needs. In some cases, billions of dollars from public, private and charitable sources are invested to help communities recover. National rhetoric often characterizes these efforts as a "return to normal." But for many American communities, pre-disaster conditions are far from optimal. Large segments of the U.S. population suffer from preventable health problems, experience inequitable access to services, and rely on overburdened health systems. A return to pre-event conditions in such cases may be short-sighted given the high costs - both economic and social - of poor health. Instead, it is important to understand that the disaster recovery process offers a series of unique and valuable opportunities to improve on the status quo. Capitalizing on these opportunities can advance the long-term health, resilience, and sustainability of communities - thereby better preparing them for future challenges. Healthy, Resilient, and Sustainable Communities After Disasters identifies and recommends recovery practices and novel programs most likely to impact overall community public health and contribute to resiliency for future incidents. This book makes the case that disaster recovery should be guided by a healthy community vision, where health considerations are integrated into all aspects of recovery planning before and after a disaster, and funding streams are leveraged in a coordinated manner and applied to health improvement priorities in order to meet human recovery needs and create healthy built and natural environments. The conceptual framework presented in Healthy, Resilient, and Sustainable Communities After Disasters lays the groundwork to achieve this goal and provides operational guidance for multiple sectors involved in community planning and disaster recovery. Healthy, Resilient, and Sustainable Communities After Disasters calls for actions at multiple levels to facilitate recovery strategies that optimize community health. With a shared healthy community vision, strategic planning that prioritizes health, and coordinated implementation, disaster recovery can result in a communities that are healthier, more livable places for current and future generations to grow and thrive - communities that are better prepared for future adversities.
No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each. One way to reduce the impacts of disasters on the nation and its communities is to invest in enhancing resilience-the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative addresses the broad issue of increasing the nation's resilience to disasters. This book defines "national resilience", describes the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters, and frames the main issues related to increasing resilience in the United States. It also provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience and outlines additional information, data, gaps, and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation's resilience to disasters. Additionally, the book's authoring committee makes recommendations about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States. Enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward. Disaster Resilience confronts the topic of how to increase the nation's resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. Increasing disaster resilience is an imperative that requires the collective will of the nation and its communities. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.
