National Recovery Guidance - Generic Issues- Impact Assessments

Background and Context

Emergencies affect communities in a wide variety of ways. To understand what recovery comprises, one first needs to map out who is affected and how the emergency has affected them.

The impact of emergencies goes well beyond those directly affected by an emergency (eg. through injury, loss of property, evacuation). Emergencies affect, for example, onlookers, family and friends of fatalities or survivors, response and recovery workers, and the wider community.

To understand how emergencies affect individuals and their communities – and thus prioritise and scope the recovery effort – it is important to understand how emergencies impact upon the environment they live and work in. Moreover, it is important to consider how the response may have an impact on the recovery phase on an emergency. For example, if a school building is used to accommodate a Humanitarian Assistance Centre, this may cause disruption to the day-to-day activities of the school.

Below is a conceptual framework for understanding these impacts and the steps that may need to be taken to mitigate them. There are four interlinked categories of impact that individuals and communities will need to recover from. The nature of the impacts – and whether and at what level action needs to be taken – will depend in large part on the nature, scale and severity of the emergency itself.

Some examples of the types of issues that may be faced are as follows:

Policy and Guidance

There is no UK policy on how to carry out impact assessments during the recovery phase of an emergency. Guidance on the impact assessment process does exist for other specific purposes (eg. the police have guidance on the community impact assessment process for community cohesion issues), but this does not fully address the particular needs of community recovery. This is recognised as a gap and government is considering how this gap might be filled.

In the meantime, the following sections provide some general information about impact assessments and an example twelve step process that can be followed when conducting such assessments.

General

Impact assessment involves the systematic and co-ordinated collection and sharing of information about the overall size and scale of the impacts of an emergency. The establishment of the scale of an event is one of the most critical initial activities to be undertaken in an emergency situation.

To be effective, impact assessment requires a pre-determined strategy, which should include a combination of physical inspections and indicator contacts relevant to the event. A key aspect is establishing the limits of the affected area by establishing who is not affected. For a long duration event such as flooding, it can be an iterative process involving the sending out of initial assessments to others who may be able to add to the overall picture. Any such initial reports should clearly indicate where there are areas that have NOT been reported upon - these areas may or may not have been affected.

The earliest information regarding any emergency usually comes via telephone calls, at least from those who can get through to the authorities. It is easy to overlook areas without communications, and therefore not able to report their situation.

Where communications have failed or do not exist, the seeking out of information can only be done by some form of reconnaissance. Where ground reconnaissance cannot be undertaken due to ground access constraints, then aerial direct reconnaissance should be attempted or even higher-level photographic flights. Where this is not possible within a district, then requests can be made for national resources to be deployed.

It is important to carry out a community impact assessment as soon as possible to gauge the initial scale of the effect the incident has had on the community. It is vital to include businesses in this assessment as their state will have an enormous impact on the community as a whole. However, it should be recognised that the needs of businesses will often be significantly different from residents, so it may be appropriate to produce a separate business impact assessment alongside the wider community impact assessment.

The assessment will enable the Recovery Co-ordinating Group (RCG) to prioritise and resolve conflicting issues on what needs to be done within the resources available at the time. As part of the assessment process, the businesses that can best help the community to recover should be prioritised and addressed first. A food business, or a water provider for example, or another business that can directly help the community recovery (eg. due to the number of jobs it sustains), should be a high priority.

The RCG should decide what action is needed to improve the situation and monitor the progress on that action. The actions need to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time Based). The impact assessment is a continual cycle until the community has returned to normal or as close to normal as can be expected. The frequency of reassessment will gradually become longer until there is no longer any further benefit to be gained, or that the situation has been accepted or fully resolved.

The assessments would best be carried out by the specialist sub-groups of the main RCG.

Steps for an impact assessment

There are a variety of impact assessment methods. An example of an approach to assess economic losses follows. The results can help selection of recovery options from consideration of hazards and vulnerabilities in the area, cost benefit analysis, and application of risk management. Each step does not necessarily need to be explicitly followed. The starting point should always be to identify the purpose of the assessment, but beyond that, progress will often be iterative, going back over the initial steps as more information emerges to modify what has already been assessed.

The steps are outlined as follows:

1. Identify the purpose of the assessment
   Define what the assessment is intended to be used for, what problem(s) its results might address (immediate estimation (for response) or survey accurate for full recovery) and what level of accuracy it hopes to achieve (aggregation of jurisdictional areas or individuals/properties). There has to be a name and definition of the emergency in sufficient detail to define the area and time boundaries.
2. Organise consultation and information collection
   No impact assessment can be successful unless a clear process has been set up beforehand to define and manage it. There has to be:
   • a centre for operations and collecting/processing data
   • a set work plan with milestones for consultation, assessment, feedback and final reporting
   • a timeframe within which all this has to happen.

   Impact assessment involves input from many people and organisations and from assembled bodies of knowledge. This generally needs a committee made up of stakeholders to advise on the project. The consultation process not only means talking to people, but also covers setting up and running surveys, collecting and manipulating database information, and generally getting access to information in any form that would add value to the overall impact assessment.

3. Define the area and timeframe of the assessment
   In any impact assessment there has to be a clear boundary within which the impact of the emergency of that area can be defined and evaluated. It is important to define the area being assessed, especially when estimating indirect losses and benefits in the form of insurance payouts and aid.
   When defining the area of the assessment, make sure it represents the local economy affected by the emergency – not just a nominal space such as a convenient topographical line like a river. There are advantages in working to Local Authority or Parish/Town Boundaries as they are often the same boundaries that pre-event statistics, such as populations and economic returns, are based. Keep the study area in harmony with the time table for the assessment, and the extent of resources available to conduct it.
   There also has to be a timeframe set to define how long after the emergency the assessment will be considering losses associated with it. Clearly, any assessment needs start and finish dates. Consider using a timeframe which is consistent with that of the response to, and of the recovery from, the hazard event. A flood event may use a timeframe of at least one to two years to fully assess indirect and intangible losses – unless indirect and intangible losses are judged to be unimportant in the emergency in question. As impact assessments will have to be reported during and after the emergency, consideration should be given to estimates of the likely indirect losses.
4. Select the type of assessment to be made
   There are three commonly used approaches in assessing impacts after an emergency. They are:
   • A rapid assessment, based largely upon pre-existing data for losses from similar previous emergencies – this is estimation from historic data – if relevant data exists.
   • A synthetic approach, based upon modelled estimations of losses to model natural, built, social, and economic environments (e.g. using average building types and contents, population distributions, and economic models). Impacts are based on assumptions for the time or time-span of the event.
   • A survey approach, where surveys are used to establish actual losses of the event being assessed.

   Some combination of approaches could be used. The survey approach is commonly required for the post-event impact assessment – to enable effective recovery management. In selecting appropriate assessment methods, take account of the advantages and disadvantages of each method.

   Inspections and Needs Assessments (surveys)
   Where possible, surveys should combine inspections (making judgements from visual checks, such as whether a house may be safely reoccupied) with needs assessments (which involve interviewing affected residents). To cover both in a single visit to inform recovery management requires careful management and co-ordination. Much of the critical information will have been collected during more rapid response activities. Registration (the process of recovering personal details of those affected by the emergency) will have identified many of the affected people and safety inspections will have produced a list of damaged properties.

   Inspections and needs assessments require the adoption of clear and consistent criteria for reporting so that accurate comparisons can be prepared. For example, an agreed definition would need to be reached as to when a property is said to be affected by flooding – is it if habitable areas were flooded, or if the garage was flooded, or if just the garden was flooded, etc? When data is to be collated over more than one local authority area (eg. during widespread flooding emergencies), it is even more important that clearly defined criteria are agreed and used by all – particularly if funding streams may flow from this.

   Building inspectors, insurance assessors and environmental health officers are all likely to make inspections. The inspection process needs to be managed to ensure that priority tasks are completed first and that coverage is completed with efficient use of resources.

   Allowance needs to be given to additional impacts that may follow the initial hazard event (eg. further rainfall or another high tide following a major flood, or the failure of a lifeline, such as a road, that survived the hazard event but then fails when it has to carry increased loads as other roads are not now available).

   Surveys can be used to assist short-term recovery by:

   • determining numbers, locations, circumstances and ethnicity of displaced and/or injured people
   • assessing the safety of buildings for occupation and continued use
   • assessing the state of lifeline utilities
   • assessing the need for temporary works, such as shoring and temporary securing of property
   • protecting property from unnecessary demolition.

   Inspections and needs assessments also contribute to longer-term recovery measures through:

   • defining personal and community needs
   • determining the aid and resources required for permanent recovery
   • estimating the total cost of damage
   • acquiring engineering, scientific and insurance data to inform the mitigation process.
5. Obtain information about the hazard event
   The aim of this part of an impact assessment is not to go into precise definition of the extent and characteristics of the hazard event but to focus on the key aspects in sufficient detail for the purposes of assessment. The starting point is generally a map, in whatever format best describes:
   • the extent of the affected or assessed area
   • the route of a moving hazard, such as a flood inundation or airborne contamination.

   A map(s) would be supported by a wide range of source data such as:

   • automated or manual field measurements during and after the emergency, such as flood depths and flow rates, projected rainfall
   • photographs, television or private videotape records, eyewitness accounts
   • reports on any other secondary impacts from the emergency, such as resulting contamination or building/infrastructure failures.
6. Obtain information about the people, assets and activities at risk
   Impact assessment is a measure of damage and disruption to assets and the effect this has on people and businesses in the affected and other areas. Environmental losses also may be important. Unfortunately, impact assessment sometimes has to measure the occurrence (where, who, how many) of death, injury and displacement resulting from the emergency.

   A full list needs to be prepared in consultation with informed parties after an actual emergency. The outcome should be a database of everything likely to be affected by the hazard event.

7. Identify the types of impacts
   In this step, the information derived in Steps 5 and 6 is used to separate impacts into categories, generally described as direct or indirect losses, and tangible or intangible. This helps define where the major impact components are likely to arise and what measurement techniques will be needed. Measurement techniques will depend on the approach selected in Step 4. Intangibles are often ignored, yet are frequently identified as the most significant losses by the people affected.
8. Measure the extent of losses from all sources
   This is where the counting of losses starts. Step 4 outlines the ways of addressing impact measurement in the survey, synthetic and averaging approaches to impact assessment, when looking at direct, indirect and intangible losses. Rather than grouping all losses by each category of loss (direct, indirect and intangible), it may be more practical to collate them by ‘loss sectors’, and determine indirect, direct and intangible losses for each sector at a time.

   For example, in a typical flood emergency, loss sectors like these could be used to separate the items into study areas including residential, rural (including farming type, eg, dairy, horticulture, etc), industrial, cultural heritage, vehicles/boats, commercial (including retail, tourism and hospitality), infrastructure, environmental, etc.

9. Decide whether to count ‘actual’ or ‘potential’ losses
   The use of actual or potential losses raises a number of issues for recovery management. For recovery, actual losses result from survey or direct indicators (eg. loss of retail activity); potential losses are forecasts – dependant on the degree of recovery achieved:
   • Actual losses may discriminate against well-prepared communities if the loss assessment is used to decide on the worth of mitigation options.
   • Actual losses may discriminate against poorer communities as they will typically have fewer assets and less economic activity to be damaged by a hazard.
   • The difference between actual and potential losses will change considerably over time as people move and as other circumstances change.
10. Calculate Annual Average Damages (AAD) if needed
    This step is generally useful for detailing the economic impact to a region and the required investment the recovery redevelopment and the disaster mitigation that can be economically justified (in terms of losses avoided on an average year, using an estimate of AAD. AAD is calculated by plotting loss estimates for a given hazard at a range of magnitudes, against the probability of occurrence of the hazard event.
11. Assess benefits to region of analysis
    Economic assessment measures the net loss to the economy in the area of analysis. To obtain net loss, any benefits to the economy resulting from the emergency need to be subtracted from the assessed losses. Assessment of benefits is particularly important within a regional context because post-event aid and insurance payouts will partly offset the tangible losses suffered, as the area of analysis becomes smaller. This step is only relevant for economic loss assessment.
12. Collate and present the results of the loss assessment
    Present the collated results of the impact assessment in a simple format, including maps and a table with assessments of different types of impact identified, together with any benefits from the emergency. A statement on the importance of intangibles should also be included to ensure they are not overlooked in recovery redevelopments and associated mitigation measures.

Key Messages

Conduct vulnerability assessments pre-event to understand the likely consequences of impacts.

For recovery management, undertake an impact assessment post-event, based on actual damage as surveyed during the response and early stages of recovery.

Roles and Responsibilities

Local and Regional

Impact assessments will usually be led by the local authority, but with support from other relevant partners in the Recovery Co-ordinating Group and its sub-groups. For impact assessments focusing on the needs of business, the local authority may choose to work with the relevant Regional Development Agency in carrying out the assessment.

Lead Government Department

There is no specific Lead Government Department for impact assessments, although clearly many departments will have an interest in the results of any impact assessment that is carried out following an emergency.

Funding

Local authorities are expected to fund the costs of any impact assessment process.

Links to Other Topic Sheets

• Needs of people – health
• Needs of people – non-health
• Economic and business recovery
• Recovery structures and processes
• Recovery evaluation and lessons identified processes

Case Studies (Incidents and Exercises)

• Yorkshire and Humber Flooding - Rotherham, June 2007
• Carlisle flooding: 8 January 2005

Other Useful Documents

• The Buncefield Social Impact Assessment - Final Report [PDF] (and Annexes [PDF]), January 2007 was a study commissioned to draw together, from an external and independent point of view, the scale and range of the social impacts of the Buncefield incident.
• Disaster Emergency Needs Assessment [PDF] - International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, June 2000.
• Cornwall Council has developed an Incident Impact Assessment: Decision Making Tool and accompanying completion guidelines. The Council is happy to share this with other councils or organisations who might find the tool helpful.

List of Contacts

[TBC]