This project will develop a set of models to: help guide an optimal expenditure of regional natural disaster mitigation funds, and provide insight into the many factors that interact to determine the best mix of mitigation strategies. Focusing on earthquakes and hurricanes, the regional natural disaster mitigation analysis models will help an at-risk region with a limited budget decide how much to spend on pre-event mitigation that aims to reduce future losses versus post-event recovery, and which of the many possible pre-event mitigation activities to fund so as to meet the region?s objectives, The proposed set of models will advance knowledge about natural disaster risk management and the simultaneous planning for multiple hazards. While it is widely thought that pre-disaster mitigation is desirable, and a lot has been done to develop structural and other techniques for disaster mitigation, the circumstances in which it is desirable to implement different mitigation measures are not well understood. This project will merge optimization and loss estimation modeling to provide new insights into resource allocation decisions for mitigation. The findings may be generalizable to other hazards and to risk managers in other contexts.
