D7.3 BC Models and Adaptation Strategies assessment report

Deliverable D7.3, namely “BC Models and Adaptation Strategies assessment report”, documents the work undertaken in Task 7.2 “Assessing Business Continuity Models and Adaptation Strategies”. Five Business Continuity Strategies (BCSs) are proposed that aim to enable the critical processes of Cultural Heritage (CH) communities to continue operating at least to the minimum needed extent, when those are exposed to Climate Change (CC) or non-CC aggravated hazards severely impacting their critical infrastructure and/or supply chains. Initially, a brief literature review is undertaken on state-of-the-art aspects that are relevant to business resilience as well as to key Business Continuity Plan (BCP) elements. Thereafter, a detailed description of each of the considered BCS is given, along with the relevant advantages and limitations. The first BCS, namely the “donothing” strategy, corresponds to the absence of comprehensive risk mitigation planning and is used herein as a benchmark for assessing the performance of the other four strategies. The second BCS involves “reciprocal agreements”, which are deemed to be mutual actions signed between local businesses of similar size that operate within the same sectors to allow for a resilience load balancing. Suitable for servicebased businesses, the third BCS is related to a “work-from-home” framework and essentially involves the orientation of several employees to work from their own premises. On the other hand, the fourth BCS, namely “business traffic redistribution” strategy, is more suitable for large organizations operating on a series of interchangeable physical assets, which can satisfy increased demand requests if needed. The fifth BCS is the insurance, a strategy that is always recommended for risk mitigation as it can reduce both the indirect and the direct losses of a disaster. Two insurance approaches are discussed in this deliverable, these being the “traditional indemnity” and the “innovative parametric” insurance. Finally, the deliverable deals with the development of several methods to integrate the aforementioned BCSs in the context of the socioeconomic tool that was developed before in Task 5.5. Through this process, the effect of each BCS to the production capacity of a business sector is demonstrated by realizing several hypothetical disaster scenarios in two HYPERION pilot sites, i.e., the city of Rhodes and the city of Tønsberg. Based on the estimated indirect losses that are predicted for these scenarios per pilot site by means of the socioeconomic analyses, a number of general yet informed guidelines are given for the application of the BCSs on either product- or service-based business sectors