Risk mitigation

Social capital is widely recognized as one of the five capitals that can be used to sustain livelihood, avert risk and vulnerability. This paper looks at the use of social capital as a risk mitigation device and to sustain livelihood and food security. In this research IFPRI panel data collected during 1996-1997 (pre-flood) and 1999-2000 (post-flood period) and field data

This article estimates the cost effectiveness of tornado shelters using the annual probability of a tornado and new data on fatalities per building struck by a tornado. This approach differs from recent estimates of the cost effectiveness of tornado shelters in Reference 1 that use historical casualties. Historical casualties combine both tornado risk and resident action. If residents of tornado-prone states take greater precautions, observed fatalities might not be much higher than in states with lower risk. Estimation using the tornado probability avoids this potential bias. Despite the very different method used, the estimates are $68 million in permanent homes and $6.0 in mobile homes in Oklahoma using a 3% real discount rate, within about 10% of estimates based on historical fatalities. The findings suggest that shelters provide cost-effective protection for mobile homes in the most tornado-prone states but not for permanent homes.

Risk insurance for disasters plays a relevant part in the implementation of risk reduction strategies during the pre-disaster phase. This is essential to support risk management towards decreasing the marginal risk allowing policy holders to transfer risk to avoid considerable financial loads from the costs incurred during the recovery phase in a post-disaster phase. There is evidence that the introduction of an integrated risk insurance strategy for community resilience planning is still lacking. Thus, this undermines the possibility to have proper optimized holistic risk management; on the one hand this strengthens pre-disaster risk mitigation measures, mostly relying on mitigative infrastructural solutions, and on the other hand it better defines risk prevention strategies mostly connected to land planning and urban development. This paper will show how insurance markets can play a key role towards mitigating the economic consequences of natural and climate change disasters, and ...

One of the most exigent features of a risk is risk alteration that can exacerbate its consequences and make its management difficult. Therefore, good risk management models should be able to identify risks and monitor the changes to the risk as the project progresses. This feature is not emphasized in the current risk management models, and this has resulted in a high rate of failure in software risk management. This paper discusses the development of a software risk management model that uses features of an embedded audit componet as a verifier core. Special emphasis is on managing the risks of the risk management process which is done by remonitoring the risks and activities through the verifier core. The model includes four main phases – risk identification; measurement; assessment; and mitigation and contingency plan. In order to evaluate the model, a six-month case study was conducted using the customer relationship management system of an industrial design company. The use of the proposed model produces the following results: more accurate risk classification (phase 1); more exact definition of the deviation rate from the established schedule (phase 2); the model adapts well to the changes to the risk factors, and makes better assessment of the consequences (phase 3); in implementing the mitigation and contingency plan, the dynamic verifier core successfully uncovers ignorable mistakes and also helps to reduce or lessen the consequences (phase 4). The proposed model has proven to be effective in reducing the unforeseen risks. This will improve the success rates of software projects.

Primer manual de mitigación de riesgos y desastres para Puerto Rico, desarrollado gracias al Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños de Hunter College (CUNY) y el Instituto de Desarrollo Empresarial y Acción Comunitaria (IdeaComún).  Define mitigación de riesgos; vincula los cursos de acción (COAs) del Informe de Recuperación del Gobernador con el área de mitigación; describe los tres programas que financian la mitigación aplicables a la recuperación de Puerto Rico: Mitigación bajo el Programa Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Relief (CDBG-DR) de HUD; Mitigación 406 bajo el Programa de Public Assistance (PA) de FEMA; y el Hazard Mitigation Grants Program (HMGP/404) de FEMA; explica la importancia de los planes de mitigación municipales; y provee una guía y recursos de apoyo para el acceso inicial a los fondos HMGP mediante cartas de intención, entre otros.

Increased clock frequencies, higher transistor counts, lower voltage levels, and reduced noise margin have exponentially raised performance of modern microprocessors but made processors more vulnerable to soft errors. To detect soft errors, redundant software and hardware are introduced frequently by the designers but software techniques have shown their capability to protect against soft errors without any hardware overhead and are more beneficial for their flexibility and low cost as well as easier to deployment. The techniques of Software fault-tolerance enable application protection by constructing redundancy into the compiled code. A new methodology is proposed for tolerating soft errors through triple modular redundancy. Experimental studies show that this method has increased reliability and offer efficient protection via software modulation in comparison to existing duplication and triplication methods.

A copy of Journal published on RICS https://ww3.rics.org/uk/en/journals/construction-journal/how-to-manage-the-risk-of-construction-claims.html?cid=em|newsletter|in%20the%20spotlight:built%20environment%20and%20construction|all|apac:asia|journal|20/10/2021&deliveryName=DM29170

Merryn Stoyle

In my experience, claims arise for a number of reasons, including the following.

The contract specification or other key provisions – such as completion dates, any preconditions or other processes set out in the contract – have been badly thought out, are vague and open to interpretation, or are too impractical to be implemented.
The contractually agreed timescales for the execution of works are getting shorter, meaning that contracts or subcontracts are being let while the design is still under development.
Real or perceived access issues are caused by multiple parties working simultaneously at the site.
One or more parties did not read the subcontract or fully understand it, including both the general terms and the technical specification.
Parties have often cut costs to the minimum during the tender process, and seek to recover these by other means.
Businesses' commercial strategies often conflict with their own contractual obligations. In other words, the strategy to achieve planned profit margins conflicts with the provisions of the contract. This may be due to how the contract determines that variation orders, or similar, are to be valued, or it because the actual scope of the contract states that items are in the subcontractor’s scope, rather than variation orders.

This experiment was conducted as part of a risk mitigation BIOTUBE Precursor hardware demonstration payload aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis on STS-101. The objectives were to provide a demonstration and test of the newly developed BIOTUBE water delivery subsystem, and to determine the optimal water volume and germination paper combination for the automated imbibition and germination of flax (Linum usitatissimum)

During the September 21, 1999, earthquake in Taiwan, a lot of pile foundations on the under-constructed Freeway Route 3 were subjected to very large ground displacements induced by the rupture of Chelungpu Fault. This paper presents the results of measurement on pile displacements and related damages after the earthquake. Based on these observations, different failure modes of pile foundations across

It is now well known that the world community must share the risks and hazards deriving from climate change and, more generally, from the environment. The fact that just a few months ago, at the end of summer 2019, the European Bank for reconstruction and development (EBRD), issued the first World's first dedicated climate resilience bond confirms the thesis according to which financial, social and economic instruments are always most necessary for the development of society and to avoid that natural hazards can, as occurred in the past, cause extremely heavy damages with negative repercussions on every single area of a community. Starting from the characteristics of resilience bonds and reinsurance, the paper seeks to highlight the potential advantages that would derive from a systematic application of recursive contractual instruments (smart contracts). The authors focused on the study of the projection of financial and quantitative data of resilience and catastrophe bonds on ...

The global outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has forced the closure, or the reduction of the use of, many large facilities, as hospital wards at an unprecedented scale. Now, as many communities start planning for re-opening after the lockdown, previously abandoned buildings need to be prepared and cleared from becoming a breeding area for legionella or a source of infection for Legionnaires’ Disease (LD). Since LD attract up to 30% of sporadic cases of hospital-acquired pneumonia caused by legionellae and based on the literature reviewed, a multidisciplinary ‘communication model’ is proposed as an approach for enhancing the capacity of the hospitals, or any similar buildings, to mitigate any potential risk from legionella during the stages of re-opening. The approach takes into consideration all the challenges of LD, the legionella bacterium and the water stagnation. The main implication of this paper is that it brings different disciplines together to mitigate any possibilities of co-infections coming from the legionella, especially for the most vulnerable patients.

The impact of exogenous shocks on business strategy, and possible responses to those threats, have received growing attention when considering the challenges of conducting business in an increasingly complex business environment. Scenario/contingency planning is a tool used by firms to translate their organizational learning capabilities into preconceived operational responses designed to react to, and then recover from, an exogenous shock.

Risk a resultant of exposure, is the probability of loss but exposure is a possibility
of loss. But risk provides a basis for opportunity. Financial Markets presently have
exposure to indefinite risks. Change in market prices offers risk. It’s difficult to
eliminate risk but strategies, active management to mitigate the risk needs to be
formulated. Financial risk can be hedged or a portion of it can be hedged or hence
simply accept the financial instrument with the risk. The present paper constitutes the
analysis of two research paper in order to understand about financial risk and its
management.

This paper describes an integrated framework for handling disruptions in supply chains. The integrated framework incorporates two main views on managing disruptions, namely pre- and post-disruption views, which are usually treated as separate issues in existing frameworks described in literature. The proposed integrated framework is used to structure literature review on the supply chain risk and disruption management. The literature review gives an overview of key aspects and specific methods which can be used for each step in the framework. Finally, two main observations in the existing literature on supply chain risk/disruption management are discussed. The first observation is that the literature has not uniformly discussed different parts of the framework. In general, the post-disruption process for managing supply chain disruptions has received relatively less attention than pre-disruption activities. The second observation which can be regarded as a direction for future research is lack of quantitative studies involving modeling and simulation to support the decision makers in better handling supply chain disruption.

As software organizations try to mitigate operational and technical risk that occurs when using software, there is need to develop a knowledge intensive system to assist team members in mitigating both operational and technical risk. Knowledge mapping in risk mitigation context is in its infancy and has the potential to address both operational and technical risk faced by software organizations. However, as the amount and depth of organizational knowledge increases, it poses some challenges to software organizations. The key challenges for knowledge intensive organizations are how to identify, assimilate, disseminate, and apply these risk knowledge; particularly between different team members in same software development project. Thus this paper proposes a knowledge mapping process model to assist in mitigating risk (operational and technical) that occurs in software organizations. Knowledge mapping is the field within Knowledge Management (KM) that aims to optimize the efficient an...

The construction industry, for many decades, has been underperforming in terms of the success of project delivery. Construction delays have become typical of many construction projects leading to lawsuits, project termination, and ultimately dissatisfied stakeholders. Experts have highlighted the lack of adoption of modern technologies as a cause of underproductivity. Nevertheless, the construction industry has an opportunity to tackle many of its woes through Construction 4.0, driven by enabling digital technologies such as machine learning. Consequently, this paper describes a framework based on the application of machine learning for delay mitigation in construction projects. The key areas identified for machine learning application include "cost estimation", "duration estimation", and "delay risk assessment". The developed framework is based on the CRISP-DM graphical framework. Relevant data were obtained to implement the framework in the three key areas identified, and satisfactory results were obtained. The machine learning methods considered include Multi Linear Regression Analysis, K-Nearest Neighbours, Artificial Neural Networks, Support Vector Machines, and Ensemble methods. Finally, interviews with professional experts were carried out to validate the developed framework in terms of its applicability, appropriateness, practicality, and reliability. The main contribution of this research is in its conceptualization and validation of a framework as a problem-solving strategy to mitigate construction delays. The study emphasized the cross-disciplinary campaign of the modern construction industry and the potential of machine learning in solving construction problems.