RMS and 100 Resilient Cities work with Mexico City

Through RMS’ partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative, RMS is tasked with helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social, and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century.

RMS and 100 Resilient Cities created a preliminary analysis that characterises the resilience of Mexico City’s portfolio of 312 publicly-owned markets and provides a sense of the probabilistic catastrophe loss models used.

Measuring extreme risk, while essential to increasing the resilience of a city’s critical infrastructure, is challenging as disasters are so volatile. History is a poor indicator of disaster risk, so a single scenario from living memory is unlikely to provide a robust characterization of resilience to possible casualties, losses, or economic impacts.

However, probabilistic catastrophe loss models have emerged in response to this problem, making it possible to estimate the severity of potential losses at a variety of probabilities. These models can then be used to quantify a city’s resilience today, set realistic targets for future resilience, and inform progress towards those targets.

The EP (Exceedance Probability) curve shows that the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake is far from the be-all and end-all for these markets. There is a 1% chance of these markets experiencing a loss that is five times larger than the modeled loss of the 1985 earthquake. There is a non-trivial chance of a loss being even ten times larger.

This approach can be used to analyse other pieces of critical infrastructure in Mexico City, such as the Central de Abasto (the largest wholesale market in the world), the CETRAMs, and the city’s network of roads. These modeling techniques prove even more insightful with larger volumes of assets as they can begin to uncover, quantify, and address complex interdependencies between the city’s vital assets and the threats they face.

On top of this, even more potential value remains in further resilience modeling of this type. It can be used to explore the cost-benefit of resilience investments in individual markets or to take a more holistic view of resilience, going beyond earthquake to include other perils such as terrorism, infectious diseases, and drought.

As part of the work with 100 Resilient Cities, RMS has worked with:

San Francisco, California: Quantify economic risk to the city from sea level rise

Berkeley, California: Develop a cost-justified retrofit program for the city’s earthquake shelters

Medellín, Colombia: Design a financing strategy that takes into account catastrophic events