View book here: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Flood+Damage+Survey+and+Assessment%3A+New+Insights+from+Research+and+Practice-p-9781119217923

As part of Zurich Insurance’s flood resilience alliance, the post‐event review capability (PERC) provides analysis and independent reviews of large flood events, while providing accessible, consistent, and generalizable insights. Research has established the need to build resilience in infrastructure, services, and agents’ capacity and livelihood systems if risk is to be proactively reduced. A consistent, practice‐based and transdisciplinary disaster forensic analysis methodology will help push disaster risk management and resilience building out of their traditionally sector‐focused realms. Building future resilience is dependent upon consistently capturing and reviewing lessons of the past, both within and across disciplinary boundaries, especially in a dynamic environment of urbanization and climate change.

This chapter explains the rationale and approach of the PERC methodology and presents consolidated findings from studies conducted so far. PERC seeks to answer questions related to flood resilience, flood risk management, and catastrophe intervention. It looks at what worked well (identifying best practice) and opportunities for improvements (providing actionable recommendations). Since 2013, PERC has analyzed flood events in locations from Western Europe to Nepal to Morocco, while engaging in dialogue with authorities, affected people, and actors in the disaster risk management space. Knowledge collected in these analyses is being consolidated and made available to help build resilience. Despite the flexibility of the PERC approach, which encourages context‐specific analysis without predetermining outcomes, upon consolidating our findings and lessons learnt from the PERC studies conducted to date, we find there are profound similarities in the points of failure, success stories, and capacities during floods across a wide context.

Keywords: Disaster Risk Reduction/Hazard Management; Floods, Hurricanes, Typhoons; Learning from Natural Hazards; Monitoring and Evaluation; Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation