Launched in 2013, Zurich’s Flood Resilience Alliance created PERC as part of Zurich’s corporate responsibility program. The goal of the Flood Resilience Alliance is to link academia with the humanitarian sector, private sector and communities to improve public dialogue around and generate integrated solutions to enhance flood resilience. To date, PERCs have been conducted for floods in Central and Eastern Europe, Morocco, the UK, and Nepal (Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, 2014a; Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, 2014b; Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, 2015a; Zurich Flood Resilience Alliance, 2015b; MacClune et al, 2015).

The Post-Event Review Capability (PERC) is a systematic framework for the analysis of a disaster event, focusing on how a specific hazard event became a disaster. PERC is typically conducted and published within a year of the disaster, though it can be used in other ways or in other timeframes as necessary. The PERC process evaluates the successes and failures in the management of disaster risk prior to the event, disaster response and post-disaster recovery. If the disaster occurred in two different areas with one more badly impacted than the other, PERC can help determine why the impacts were disproportionate. PERC then identifies future opportunities for intervention/action that could reduce the risk posed by the occurrence of similar, future hazard events. PERC uses a system-wide approach to review disasters, analyzing across scales and sectors, and all aspects of the disaster management cycle—prospective and corrective risk reduction, preparedness, response, and recovery. It provides a bird’s-eye view of why the disaster occurred and how resilience might be built. While Zurich’s PERCs to-date have primarily focused on floods, the PERC process/methodology can be applied to review any rapid-onset hazard or shock, natural or non-natural, such as floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, terrorist attacks, and so on.

Keywords: Floods, Hurricanes, Typhoons; Learning from Natural Hazards; Monitoring and Evaluation; Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation