Abstract
The ever-increasing population living near active volcanoes highlights the need for the implementation of effective risk reduction measures to save lives and reduce the impact of volcanic unrest and eruptions. To help identify volcanic systems associated with potential high risk and prioritize risk reduction strategies, we introduce a new Volcanic Risk Ranking (VRR) methodology that integrates hazard, exposure, and vulnerability as factors that increase risk, and resilience as a factor that reduces risk. Here we present a description of the methodology using Mexican volcanoes as a case study, while a regional application to Latin American volcanoes is presented in a companion paper (Guimarães et al., submitted). With respect to existing strategies, the proposed VRR methodology expands the parameters associated with hazard and exposure and includes the analysis of 4 dimensions of vulnerability (physical, systemic, social, economic) and of resilience. In particular, we propose 41 parameters to be analyzed, including 9 hazard parameters, 9 exposure parameters, 10 vulnerability parameters and 13 resilience parameters. Since the number of parameters evaluated for each risk factor is different, they are normalized to have the same weight based on dedicated sensitivity analyses. In order to best illustrate the methodology, the proposed VRR is here applied to 13 Mexican volcanoes and compared with other approaches. We found that the volcanoes associated with the highest combination of hazard, exposure and vulnerability (3-factor VRR) for this geographic area are Tacaná and El Chichón regardless of the analyzed time window of eruption occurrence (i.e., <1 and <10 ka). Nonetheless, the volcanoes with eruption <1 ka that require the most urgent actions as associated with no or few resilience measures in place are Michoacán-Guanajuato Volcanic Field and San Martín Tuxtla (4-factor VRR); the top volcanoes in the 4-factor VRR with eruption <10 ka are Michoacán-Guanajuato Volcanic Field and Las Cumbres.
Highlights
Unplanned urbanization may lead to a concentration of population, wealth and increasingly complex economic activities in areas exposed to natural hazards, including volcanic phenomena (e.g., Zenklusen, 2007)
The first definition of volcanic risk was provided by Fournier d’Albed (1979): Risk Value × Vulnerability × Hazard where risk is the possibility of a loss of life, property, or productive capacity; value is the number of people, assets, or economic activities exposed; vulnerability is the expected proportion of the value be lost as a result of a volcanic event; and hazard is the probability of a specific area to be affected by a volcanic event over a certain period of time
The exposure and vulnerabilities analyses for Mexican volcanoes were conducted considering the information available in the National Atlas of Risks, an online system developed by the Civil Protection authorities that allows for the consultation of data related to exposure to different hazards and the 2015 census of the Instituto Nacional de Geografía y Estadística (INEGI)
Summary
Unplanned urbanization may lead to a concentration of population, wealth and increasingly complex economic activities in areas exposed to natural hazards, including volcanic phenomena (e.g., Zenklusen, 2007). In the case of landslides, a global risk map by country was constructed by Yang et al (2015) presenting the expected annual mortality caused by these phenomena. In this approach, risk represents the interaction of hazard intensity with population density and its vulnerability. Lowenstein and Talai (1984) ranked volcanoes in Papua New Guinea, including hazard parameters based on geological features, historically recorded hazardous phenomena, and present unrest These hazard parameters were summed with population data to calculate a relative potential hazard rating
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