NGO–academic–business collaboration
for enhancing disaster risk reduction,
response and relief
8 February 2013 at Aon Benfield, London
WORKSHOP CONVENORS
Kate Crowley
Stephen Edwards
Chris Ewing
Oriol Gaspa Rebull
Clare Harris
Catherine Tillyard
Catholic Agency for Overseas Development
Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Centre
Aon Benfield
Aon Benfield
HelpAge International
Aon Benfield
WORKSHOP REPORT
This short report captures the rationale, activities and outcomes from a
cross-sector workshop organised between the Aon Benfield UCL Hazard
Centre (ABUHC) at University College London (UCL), Aon Benfield, the
Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) and HelpAge
International1 that took place on 8 February 2013. Hosted by Aon
Benfield, the workshop represented a definitive step towards improved
collaboration between academia, non-government organisations (NGOs)
and the private sector.
Contents
Rationale......................................................................................2
Setting the scene and academic partnerships ....................................2
Current development and humanitarian initiatives..............................3
The re/insurance industry ...............................................................5
Collaborative opportunities .............................................................5
Designing ways forward .................................................................6
Conclusion....................................................................................8
Annex 1: Workshop Agenda ............................................................8
Annex 2: Workshop Participants ......................................................9
Annex 3: Summary of group discussions ........................................ 10
1
CAFOD and HelpAge International co-chair a sub-group of the PPA Resilience Learning Group, which aims to integrate science and local
knowledge into resilience building programmes. Progamme Partnership Agreements (PPAs) are one of DFID’s (Department for International
Development) main support mechanisms to Civil Society Organisations.
1
RATIONALE
With increasing calls and opportunities for multi-sector collaboration in
disaster mitigation, preparedness, response and relief, this workshop
aimed to explore the opportunities for collaboration between UCL, Aon
and international NGOs, with the proposed outcome to initiate
collaborative projects of mutual benefit. To achieve this goal, the
workshop aimed to fulfil the following objectives:
 define issues of mutual interest and opportunity for working
together, including needs and applications of tools and expertise;
 understand mutual synergies for research, tool development or
enhancement, training and knowledge exchange;
 identify themes or regions of mutual interest;
 identify funding and other resources in place or needed;
 produce a plan of action, including definition of topics and leaders.
SETTING THE SCENE AND ACADEMIC PARTNERSHIPS
The first of the three scene setting presentations commenced with Steve
Edwards of the ABUHC. He began by giving an overview of increasing and
projected disaster trends and the slow progress in much advocated twoand three-way NGO–academic–business collaborations. He also examined
regions of high exposure to natural hazards, identifying southeast Asia as
a possible region of mutual interest, and reflected on the disastrous year
of 2010 in terms of what-if scenarios. He highlighted that we all have
strengths and resources we can share and these should be used in
working together more closely to ensure that we understand risk better,
be more anticipatory and get better at risk reduction and disaster
response and recovery.
Steve then went on to introduce the ABUHC, which was established in
1997 with one of its remits to provide hazard and risk science to the
re/insurance sector. In this regard it was probably ahead of its time, but
is now an example of best practice for academic-business partnerships.
With its sixteen years of experience it now sits in an informed position in
terms of pure and applied hazard and risk science research, education
and knowledge exchange with the re/insurance, humanitarian and
development sectors, and it is therefore ideally placed to foster NGO–
academic–business collaborations. Its expertise currently include:
 Geological hazards
 Multi-hazards
 Climate and weather extremes



Climate-forcing of natural hazards
Disaster and risk management studies
Natural resource risk management
The ABUHC is widely considered a leader in co-production and coapplication of scientific research and is involved in several successful
partnerships, including:
 Aon Benfield Research
 Tropical Storm Risk
 The former Science and Policy Interfaces for Disaster Reduction
(SPIDER) network
 Research and knowledge exchange partnership with CAFOD for risk
reduction
 Work with the Consortium of British Humanitarian Agencies (CBHA)
on parametric insurance
Steve concluded by looking to the future and encouraging participants to
consider the opportunities in academic partnerships and associated
funding resources, such as:
 MSc projects
 PhD/EngD projects
 Knowledge transfer partnerships and secondments
 Access to standard academic grant programmes
CURRENT DEVELOPMENT AND HUMANITARIAN INITIATIVES
Clare Harris from HelpAge International coordinated an NGO presentation
that provided an overview of current DRR (disaster risk reduction)
methods. These were exemplified by case studies from the sector,
including the CBHA ‘Strengthening field, regional and global capacity for
decision making and early action in emerging humanitarian crises’, the
ALERT system, participatory vulnerability analysis (PVA) and scenario
planning.
The CBHA project, presented by Mark Bulpitt of World Vision, is exploring
the capacity for decision-making and early action for emerging
humanitarian crisis, drawing on lessons from the Africa Early Warning
Systems (EWS) amongst others. He outlined the current challenges facing
EWS and early action including:
 Decision-making as the key issue
 Lack of accountability and too much central decision-making
 Fear of making wrong decision
 You will never be proven right for correct decision making because
it will mitigate the potential impact
 Psychological issues
The objective of this multi-stakeholder project is to provide
useable/effective analysis of early warnings at national-level through a
consortium using pre-agreed indicators.
Andrew Collodel from HelpAge International outlined their new ALERT
system for emergency preparedness. Andrew explained that humanitarian
agencies continue to be inadequately prepared to respond to early
warming, or provide effective response to disasters within the first few
days of a crisis. In response HelpAge International have designed a new
software system that enables country staff to carry out scenario planning
and risk analysis using an online database. HelpAge International
developed the ALERT software in order to:
 Monitor minimum preparedness actions (MPAs)
 E-mail alerts
 Develop approved response plans
 Improve accountability (visible and recorded)
 Map organisational preparedness
In addition it is a multilingual platform and will be made available to any
humanitarian agency. There is also now an Alert Consortium consisting of
HelpAge, Oxfam GB, Plan, Care International, Merlin and CAFOD. This
consortium will help to shape the next steps for this initiative:
 Online scenario planning
 Standardised preparedness model, templates and software package
 Improved maps
 Off-line client access
 On-line help
Finally, Clare Harris, from HelpAge International gave an overview of
DRR, CCA (climate change adaptation) and resilience. She explained that
the NGO approach to DRR is conventionally community-based and takes
inspiration from participatory methods, HVCAs (hazard, vulnerability and
capacity assessments) or PVAs. In essence an NGO will carry out hazard
and vulnerability assessments using community knowledge. The challenge
is how to integrate this knowledge with scientific information, such as
climate projections. To explore how this work links with humanitarian
response, Maggie Ibrahim from World Vision highlighted a scenario
planning initiative that they have just begun. It is a five-year programme
looking at scenario planning working with uncertainty (e.g. climate
change and food crises). Kate Crowley (CAFOD) summed up the NGO
presentations emphasising the need for preparedness of:
 Governments
 Local communities
 Humanitarian agencies
She stated that collaboration could strengthen the many innovative ideas
and projects that are building disaster resilience.
THE RE/INSURANCE INDUSTRY
The final presentation of the morning came from our hosts Aon Benfield.
Catherine Tillyard and Chris Ewing introduced the re-insurance industry
and the tools that they at Aon Benfield have developed and use.
Catherine highlighted the different sections of Aon as a company (Aon
Risk Solutions, Aon Benfield and Aon Hewitt). Her group is part of Aon
Benfield Analytics, which focuses on the production of:
 Catastrophe models
 Impact Forecasting – build own models
 Aon Benfield Research (collaboration with academics)
Aon Benfield covers areas of the world in which international NGOs work
and they have broad experience working with many different industries.
They have produced and use a variety of tools that may have useful
applications for NGOs:
 ImpactOnDemand – an online exposure management tool
 ELEMENTS – an in-house catastrophe (Cat) model. They can
produce both stand-alone models and scenario models. One current
project models East African earthquake risk.
Other products include:
 Cat alerts
 Reports: weekly, monthly and annually
COLLABORATIVE OPPORTUNITIES
The second session of the day encouraged participants to start a dialogue
on two of the workshop objectives:
 identify themes or regions of mutual interest;
 identify funding and other resources in place or needed.
This was done using a ‘World Cafe’ methodology, where the participants
were split into five groups (of about five people) and initially asked to
discuss ideas for collaboration or further exploration (opportunities rather
than challenges). They had 15 minutes to discuss this topic then they
were asked to move to another group to review the previous discussion
(notes by a host on a flip chart) and add to or continue that discussion.
There were four rounds of 15 minutes. On the final two rounds the
participants were asked to also consider which ideas they liked the most,
how viable these were and what resources would be required and from
where would these come from. The notes from the flip charts are
summarised in Annex 3.
Discussions were lively and after this session the conveners were able to
draw out eight common themes from the World Cafe dialogue for further
and more in-depth exploration:
1. Extend existing catastrophe models to developing regions
2. Small and frequent losses (attritional losses)
3. Develop methods for analysing multi-hazards
4. Asia and Africa as regional foci
5. Data exchange: the limitations of data, quality, applications
6. Extend insurance-models locally to non-insured regions
7. Education and training
8. Funding
DESIGNING WAYS FORWARD
The final session of the day attempted to focus participants towards
designing pilot projects. Out of the eight themes highlighted above, the
participants voted to look at four viable themes that could be taken
forwards by this group in some way:
1. Data
2. Attrition
3. Models
4. Multi-hazards
In the final feedback from the groups it was clear that attrition was not
something that was a viable option to take forward; however the other
three groups believed that there was scope for future work on these
topics and suggested the next steps outlined below.
Data Group – feedback from Chris Ewing, Aon Benfield. The data group
was able to propose six initiatives to take forward.
1. There is scope for data exchange and sharing and therefore this
group has decided to set up an online forum to identify data needs,
areas of current overlap and available data sets. Simon Johnson
from British Red Cross has taken this forward and you can access
this group here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!forum/nab-data.
2. In addition Chris noted that Aon Benfield Cat Reports can be shared
and the participants should have already received their first update
(as of 18 February 2013).
3. Aon Benfield could provide a clear definition of what its models can
do and there potential application in a simple two-pager (Chris has
volunteered to produce this).
4. There could be an opportunity for the Red Cross Volunteers to
explore what fora for data sharing already exist.
5. There would also be scope/need for NGOs to receive training in
statistics, modelling and GIS.
6. There was also the idea of adding Aon’s existing political risk map
into the ALERT system.
Model Group – feedback from Oriol Gaspa, Aon Benfield. This group
identified three potential collaborative research projects with short,
medium and long timescales.
1. Provide a licence to NGOs for use of ImpactOnDemand for exposure
mapping (this could link well with a training on GIS for NGOs).
2. Tweaking the catastrophe models (ELEMENTS). This would be a
potential PhD project to examine the adjustment needed to the
current economic loss models in order to make them applicable to
NGO needs.
3. Parametric insurance. To create a standard tool for parametric
insurance. This would be a long term project and requires a
consortium of stakeholders, but would have potentially a high
impact. (Note – the Red Cross Research Centre is exploring this
topic also).
Ideas 2 and 3 could begin with a UCL Impact PhD studentship from
September 2013 onwards. These studentships would require at least one
NGO partner.
Multi-hazards Group – feedback from Catherine Tillyard, Aon Benfield.
This group focussed on one project idea that would explore a ‘proof of
concept’. Might be a Masters research project with a possible focus on
East Africa and/or the Philippines. The project would involve producing
realistic disaster scenarios for urban multi-hazard environments in
ELEMENTS. It would require running multiple scenarios. Aon Benfield
could contribute the use of ELEMENTS, whilst UCL would host the student.
The ‘concept’ would be designed (e.g. identification of appropriate city)
by, and the results shared with, the NGO community. The project would
be testing the concept of using ELEMENTS for multi-hazard scenario
planning.
Attrition – feedback from Marieke Hounjet, CBHA. This group realised
that this topic would not be possible to take forwards because it is too
expensive and the data at the local level are not available.
CONCLUSION
This distinctive workshop fulfilled its objectives and has outlined some
clear ways forward for academic-NGO-business collaborations. Informal
feedback from the day suggests that the workshop was extremely
productive and provided all the participants with adequate time for
networking and dialogue.
However, the ideas and plans laid out in this report require organisations
and individuals to take ownership of these opportunities in order to take
them forward. Without this action, the workshop will become yet another
talking shop.
The organisers of this event would like to thank Aon Benfield for hosting
the workshop and those people at Aon Benfield, the ABUHC, HelpAge
International and CAFOD who are making this collaboration a reality.
ANNEX 1: WORKSHOP AGENDA
09:00 Registration and morning coffee
09:30 Welcome and introduction led by Stephen Edwards, UCL.
10:15 Current development and humanitarian initiatives led by
Clare Harris, HelpAge International
11:00 Introduction to the re/insurance industry led by Catherine
Tillyard, Aon Benfield
11:45 Break and informal discussion
12:15 Group discussion: collaborative opportunities led by Kate
Crowley, CAFOD
13:15 Lunch
14:15 Feedback led by Kate Crowley, CAFOD
14:30 Designing ways forward led by Stephen Edwards, UCL
16:00 Close
ANNEX 2: WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS
Government and non-government agencies
Kareem Ahmed
British Red Cross
KareemAhmed@redcross.org.uk
Duncan Barker
Department for
duncan-barker@dfid.gov.uk
International
Development
Lucy Blown
HelpAge
lblown@helpage.org
Mark Bulpitt
World Vision UK
Mark.Bulpitt@worldvision.org.uk
Andrew Collodel
HelpAge
ACollodel@helpage.org
International
Paul Conrad
British Red Cross
PConrad@redcross.org.uk
Kate Crowley
Catholic Agency for
kcrowley@cafod.org.uk
Overseas
Development
Terry Gibson
Global Network of
terry.gibson@globalnetwork-dr.org
Civil Society
Organisations for
Disaster Reduction
Joel Hafvenstein
Tearfund
joel.hafvenstein@tearfund.org
Clare Harris
HelpAge
charris@helpage.org
Jessica Hartog
HelpAge
jhartog@helpage.org
Marieke Hounjet
Consortium of British
M.Hounjet@savethechildren.org.uk
Humanitarian
Agencies
Maggie Ibrahim
World Vision UK
Maggie.Ibrahim@worldvision.org.uk
Simon Johnson
British Red Cross
SJohnson@redcross.org.uk
Sylvie de Laborderie
British Red Cross
SDeLaborderie@redcross.org.uk
Sean Lowrie
Consortium of British
S.Lowrie@savethechildren.org.uk
Humanitarian
Agencies
Mike Noyes
Catholic Agency for
mnoyes@cafod.org.uk
Overseas
Development
Jose Luis Penya
Christian Aid
JLPenya@christian-aid.org
Hitendra Solanki*
Action Against
h.solanki@actionagainsthunger.org.uk
Hunger
University College London
Melanie Duncan
Aon Benfield UCL
melanie.duncan@ucl.ac.uk
Hazard Centre
Stephen Edwards
Aon Benfield UCL
s.edwards@ucl.ac.uk
Hazard Centre
Christopher Kilburn
Aon Benfield UCL
c.kilburn@ucl.ac.uk
Hazard Centre
Aon and Aon Benfield
Sarah Booker
Aon Risk Solutions
sarah.booker@aon.co.uk
Heidi Dennis
Aon
heidi.dennis@aon.co.uk
Chris Ewing
Aon Benfield
chris.ewing@aonbenfield.com
Ben Fox
Aon Benfield
ben.fox@aonbenfield.com
Greg Lowe
Aon
gregory.lowe@aon.co.uk
Oriol Gaspa Rebull
Aon Benfield
oriol.gaspa@aonbenfield.com
Catherine Tillyard
Aon Benfield
catherine.tillyard@aonbenfield.com
Julie Walshaw
Aon Risk Solutions
julie.walshaw@aon.co.uk
*Unable to attend.
ANNEX 3: SUMMARY OF GROUP DISCUSSIONS
Group 1:
Themes: Organisational preparedness; scenario modelling; links between local
knowledge and science (small frequent losses; attritional losses; multi-peril aggregate
cover); risk reduction into long term management and development planning; weather
based insurance products; insurance pools; how do you insure a development project.
Regions: Where there is little insured in East Africa and Asia.
Best ideas: understanding and utilisation of model output; compare lists of tertiary/peril
interests (not just natural disasters); attritional losses/frequent small events.
Funding: in-kind support; Aon’s clients.
Group 2:
Themes: Integration for improved decision making; new technologies – real time data;
data storing; model attritional losses (cross hazard mapping); models for poor countries
by insurers; local knowledge with external technical capacities.
Regions: Africa; SE Asia.
Group 3:
Themes: Financial response only through insurance needs a mechanism for ensuring
reconstruction; when is insurance seen as socially beneficial vs. an exercise in making
profit? developing new insurance schemes locally; corporate social responsibility;
attritional losses requires local knowledge and experience; identify perspectives and
priorities of different sectors; in practice reasonable uncertainty not theoretical
uncertainty...good enough; insurance industry make humanitarian maps even if not
immediately beneficial; sharing risk models; integrated financial strategy; financing risk
assessments; enhance understanding of uncertainty; of models; limitations of
probability.
Regions: Cities; Asia; by definition regions of insurance penetration are least likely to
be of humanitarian concern; sub-Sahara; Indonesia/Philippines.
Group 4:
Themes: New technologies; mapping/GIS; two way data sharing; crop models; political
risk; sudden onset disasters; weather related; sharing and open data; risk and hazard
maps; attritional losses and risk pooling; MSc projects; list free data already available;
use inverse maps – no insurance = poor; keep models practical – not overly theoretical;
models for preparedness not just response; environmental assets – new insurance?
Regions: SE Asia; Central/S Africa; Philippines; Indonesia; Pakistan; Bangladesh;
Nepal? Cities; E Africa (earthquake).
Funding: Bill Gates.
Group 5:
Themes: Take existing Cat models and tweak for uncovered areas so NGOs can use
them now and insurance industry can have early stage products to sell – MSc/research
interns; look at providing funds for NGOs through insurance ‘NGOs are the insurance for
those who cannot afford it’; modernising the culture of insurance; humanitarian action to
be more proactive in responding to risk – industry association funding; joint projects;
using private sector to compile and disseminate information in a modern way that NGOs
don’t have the money to but the time to do; analysing data for the uninsured areas possible high vulnerability areas; use of political risk map; hazard maps - could Cat
models produce loss potential for humanitarian use? NGOs need to collaborate more to
be one client; rural/urban - insurance requires a commercial application perhaps need to
look forward and depth to future risks to make a business case; attritional risk; linking
software already available; data exchange; joint advocacy; how can NGOs help
governments to access and own national risk data?
Funding: DFID GRAP.