Assessing the economic impacts of crises: A decision-support approach to long-term strategic planning

The assessment of economic impacts of crises and risk reduction generated by different mitigation measures is a multidimensional problem and often a challenging task. A major issue hindering the process is a lack of structured information. In particular, intangible losses are difficult to evaluate monetarily. Furthermore, the uncertainty related to the operational environment is difficult to estimate. This paper proposes a practical economic approach that aims at assessing different measures to mitigate the impacts of the crises. The purpose is to contribute to the understanding of the decision-making related to crisis management so that the goals of the decisions can be reached. The approach is mainly aimed at enhancing decision-making on a strategic level and at supporting crisis-management training. Additionally, a software tool based on the approach will be developed to make the assessment procedure usable in practice. The approach is demonstrated in two pilot cases: extreme winter storm in North of Finland and a major earthquake in Italy. The paper is based on research carried out in the CRISMA integration project which is funded by the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme. © 2014 WIT Press.