AFTER 10 YEARS OF CAPRA Eduardo REINOSO1, Mario ORDAZ2, Omar-Dario CARDONA3, Gabriel A. BERNAL4, Marcial CONTRERAS5 ABSTRACT The open source software CAPRA (Comprehensive Approach to Probabilistic Risk Assessment) has been used for more than 10 years. It is an on-going initiative that has been developed in different phases with the financial support, in the beginning, of the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the UNISDR. The goal, 10 years ago, was to improve the understanding of disaster risk due to natural hazard events, such as earthquakes, tsunami, hurricanes and floods, among others, and to generate incentives to develop planning solutions and results to reduce and mitigate potential damages. The original version of CAPRA is a platform that provides, for different type of users, tools, information and data to evaluate risk. CAPRA applications include a set of different software modules for different types of hazards, a standard format for exposure of different components of infrastructure, a vulnerability module with a library of vulnerability curves, and an exposure, hazard and risk mapping geographic information system. Probabilistic techniques of CAPRA employ historic and stochastic approaches to simulate hazard intensities and frequencies across a country’s or any territory. This hazard information can then be combined with the data on exposure and vulnerability, and spatially analyzed to estimate the resulting potential damage. Results are expressed in risk metrics such as the exceedance probability curve, expected annual loss and probable maximum loss for any given return period, useful for multi-hazard risk assessment. The platform’s architecture has been developed to be modular and open, enabling the possibility of harnessing various inputs and contributions. This approach enables CAPRA to become a living instrument. CAPRA’s innovation extends beyond the risk-modeling platform; a community of disaster risk users is now growing in the countries. Training and workshops have been developed in many countries in the last decade. Using CAPRA, it has been possible to design risk transfer instruments, the evaluation of probabilistic cost-benefit ratio, providing a tool for decision makers to analyze the benefits of risk mitigation strategies, such as building retrofitting. This model has been useful for land use planning, evaluation of loss scenarios for emergency response, early warning systems, on-line loss assessment systems, and for the holistic evaluation of disaster risk based on indicators, facilitating the integrated risk management by the different stakeholders involved in risk reduction. CAPRA has been used in Central and South America and in some countries of Africa, Europe and Asia, for the evaluation of the country’s risk profile for most countries of the Americas and risk metrics for 200+ countries in the framework of the United Nations Global Assessment Report GAR, among other projects. This paper illustrates how CAPRA has been used in many places for hazard and risk assessments, including seismic risk. Keywords: Probabilistic seismic risk assessment; Building damage; Risk reduction; Loss scenarios; CAPRA. 1. INTRODUCTION The loss of life and economic impact of natural hazards are most severe if they have been not properly evaluated and considered as determinants of development planning. At present, in many countries, it is necessary to help decision-makers understand risk, estimate probable losses, and reconstruction costs, so they can assess disaster risk reduction strategies. Acknowledging this need, in January 2008 the World Bank through the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) launched the CAPRA initiative (originally as Central America Probabilistic Risk Assessment) to evaluate hazard and risk in any scale or resolution (Cardona et al. 2012; Marulanda et al. 2013). It was initially aimed to 1 Professor, Instituto de Ingeniería, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico, [email protected] 2 Professor, Instituto de Ingeniería, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico, [email protected] 3 Associate Professor, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Manizales, Colombia, [email protected] 4 Technical Manager, Ingeniar: Risk Intelligence Ltda., Bogotá D.C., Colombia, [email protected] 5 Research associate, ERN, Evaluación de Riesgos Naturales, Mexico City, Mexico, [email protected] establish a common methodology and set of tools to assess disaster risk in the region and help develop risk reduction strategies. It started with pilot studies for Costa Rica and Nicaragua. CAPRA has also received support from the Central American Coordination Center for Disaster Prevention (CEPREDENAC in Spanish) and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), SFLAC6 and DFAT-AG7. In the years that followed, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) joined the effort through the Multidonor Disaster Prevention Trust Fund, expanding CAPRA to other Central and South American countries. Ten years later, the program success has turned CAPRA8 into a world class risk assessment platform, that has allowed several countries in the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia to evaluate sovereign risk for earthquake, tsunami, tropical cyclone (wind and storm-surge), excess of rain and flooding, landslides and volcanic eruptions; with the financial support of the UNISDR (GAR and DEVCO projects) and the World Bank. Since 2017, the University of Los Andes, in Bogota, was selected to manage the eCAPRA website (Uniandes, 2017) and keep open and freely available the early version of CAPRA (WB, 2016a, 2016b). The new developments, as result of the evolution and current applications of the platform worldwide, are supported by ERN Ingenieros Consultores, S.C., INGENIAR: Risk Intelligence and CIMNE9; the main joint venture members of the ERN-AL (Evaluación de Riesgos Naturales - America Latina) consortium that developed the CAPRA methodologies and tools. 2. OVERVIEW OF HAZARD AND RISK ASSESSMENT TOOLS There are sundry hazard modeling programs. GFDRR conducted a review and ranking of open source codes (GFDRR, 2014a) finding only a few combine exposure and vulnerability to assess multi-hazard risk as CAPRA does. The SHARE project (GRCG, 2010) developed a common methodology and tools to evaluate earthquake hazard in Europe. With a similar scope, CRISIS, the hazard module of CAPRA (R-CRISIS, 2017) and the Open Quake program, of the Global Earthquake Model, aim to further the development of modules for earthquake hazard and risk analysis. HAZard U.S. (HAZUS) (FEMA, 2011) has been a multi-hazard risk assessment software focused on North American typical construction types, that has been successfully used in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. InaSAFE is free and open source software that produces realistic natural hazard impact scenarios; it works as a plugin for the free GIS editor QuantumGIS and was developed with the support of the GFDRR in the framework of the Australian-Indonesia Facility for Disaster Reduction and by the Government of Indonesia. Other platforms with regional specific vulnerability curves are Risk-EU, GA and PCRAFI. Risk-EU provides capacity curves for several construction classes for European countries. Geoscience Australia (EQRM, TCRM, TsuDAT, ANUGA) developed vulnerability functions for the Asia-Pacific region and they were used with CAPRA for the Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR) of the UNISDR (2015a) in 2015. The Pacific Catastrophe Risk Assessment & Financing Initiative provides risk-related geospatial data sets based on AIR Worldwide proprietary software. Lastly, the Global Risk Model of UNISDR, based on CAPRA, has been used for the GAR 2011, 2013, 2015 and recently for the GAR Atlas 2017. It combines key elements from regional-scale studies and other platforms (vulnerability functions) to procure comparable measures of risk between countries over time for six perils. On a different-scope, sophisticated risk models have also been developed for the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF, 2017) also supported by the GFDRR. CCRIF’s risk assessment framework is specifically aimed to model risks for a community of countries subscribing natural hazard insurance. In 2007 the facility started by pooling risk among 16 countries and it has announced plans to provide similar coverage to Central American governments. CCRIF provides rapid liquidity when a policy is triggered in the wake of an earthquake, heavy rainfall, or a hurricane. The 2016-2017 models update offers a still more sophisticated risk assessment framework. For more details on CCRIF, see ERN-RED (2015). 6 Spanish Fund for Latin America and the Caribbean. 7 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Australian Government. 8 Some reports redefine CAPRA as Comprehensive Approach to Probabilistic Risk Assessment to reflect the broader scope of the platform. 9 International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE in Catalonian). 2.1 FONDEN software in Mexico With collaboration between officials from public infrastructure and buildings in México, UNAM and the firm ERN, it was possible to compute losses and loss scenarios for Mexico’s government decision- makers. This collaboration has included engineers, researchers, architects, physicians and administrative people, among others. This effort has meant the development of databases and software for financial risk assessment in Mexico. On one hand, all the information has been gathered to create a database of almost all public infrastructure