Managing Natural Hazard Risks. A Multi-Stakeholder Approach for De-Risking

As a result of decades of austerity, the economies of the Eurozone are experiencing underinvestment and crumbling infrastructures in an era of extremely severe emergencies as the climate change and aggressive global competition. The private savings glut of the rich and the strict fiscal rules suggest a crowding-in approach in partnership with big finance in a new age of infra-structures. If governments mint public infrastructures into investable assets, they can generate steady returns for investors and asset managers who look after pensions and insurances schemes and unlock trillions now devoted to welfare state. For the big finance to accept to be partner, however, governments must take the task of de-risking returns. Innovation technology and macro-financial literacy can synergically act to enhance this new de-risking role to address in a financially sustainable way the intense phenomena of Natural Hazards (NHs) that can severely compromise economic growth. This is precisely the aim of our Public-Private Partnership (PPP) among the Department of Economics, Management and Institutions of the University of Naples and a Knowledge Transfert Management, the Department of Engineering and the Aca-demic Spin-Off “STRAIN”, of the University of Campania. Our PPP has been contributing to the evaluation and mitigation of NHs such as floods, landslides and earthquakes since 2012. The extremely advanced results of this multi-stakeholder partnership ensure a better knowledge of NHs which, as evidenced in the paper, is the fundamental input for the desired Public-Private Insurance Programmes (PIPPs).