Natural Disasters Risk Assessment
Prof. Eduardo Reinoso Angulo
Professor
During the last 30 years, the methodologies for natural risk assessment have developed exponentially thanks to computers and geocoded building and infrastructure databases. The insurance and financial sectors have been pushing the limits of this risk assessment so they can have reasonably good estimations of expected losses of their portfolios for a given return period. National governments are following this trend so they can be financially prepared for infrequent and unexpected natural hazards such as hurricanes and earthquakes. In this work, such methodologies will be presented together with some recent examples. More applications such as early warning systems and alerts based not only on the hazard but also on risk assessment are already being used and will be briefly presented.
Biographical Information
Dr. Reinoso is a Civil Engineer from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He received his Ph. D. degree from Wessex Institute of Technology, Southampton, England and is a full-time researcher at the Institute of Engineering UNAM and CEO of ERN (Evaluación de Riesgos Naturales) a leading private company devoted to offer engineering and risk management solutions to the insurance sector and governments. His main field of research has been the evaluation of seismic and hurricane risk of buildings. He has published more than 120 technical papers in national and international conferences, books and journals. One of these papers won the “Outstanding Paper Award of 1999” given by the Earthquake and Engineering Research Institute (EERI).