CAPRA Probabilistic risk assessment platform

Year of publication: 2017

Access: Freely available to download from website

Link: https://ecapra.org/

Organisation(s) / Author(s): Uniandes (Universidad de los Andes)

Description

The CAPRA probabilistic risk assessment platform provides a series of tools for hazard (single and multiple unrelated), exposure and vulnerability assessment that can be standalone, or can be integrated in a probabilistic risk assessment software: CAPRA-GIS.

The CAPRA Platform is an initiative that aims to strengthen the institutional capacity for assessing, understanding and communicating disaster risk. CAPRA started in 2008 as a partnership between the Center for Coordination of Natural Disaster Prevention in Central America (CEPREDENAC), UNDRR, the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) and the World Bank to raise awareness among countries in Central America by providing a set of tools to better understand the risk of natural events. Since 2017, Uniandes (Universidad de los Andes) manages and owns the CAPRA platform.

The main objective is to maintain, update, improve and disseminate the capabilities, information, software, methodologies and knowledge that have been integrated through several years in the CAPRA platform.

The hazard modules include software applications for geological (earthquake, volcano, landslides and tsunami (under construction)), hydrometeorological (drought (under construction), flood, precipitation and hurricane) and climate change (under construction).

The exposure modules will provide data collection forms for infrastructure potentially exposed to a hazard (not yet available).

Vulnerability modules enable users to develop vulnerability curves for each hazard class and asset, which are required for the probabilistic risk assessment.

CAPRA-GIS v2.4 is the probabilistic risk assessment software. It is a Geographic Information System orientated to probabilistic risk calculations. Outputs from the hazard, exposure and vulnerability modules are in the correct format for importing into CAPRA-GIS for the risk assessment. It is freely available to download from https://ecapra.org/topics/capra-gis along with a user manual (in English).

Case study projects that have used CAPRA can be viewed here

Technical considerations

All tools are freely available to download from the CAPRA website and can be run on Microsoft Windows. Input data files are generated from the hazard, exposure and vulnerability modules. User manuals are available online.

Keywords

Probabilistic risk assessment; multiple hazard; exposure; vulnerability; climate change

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