Intense rains, historic floods, and prolonged droughts are no longer hypothetical scenarios but real challenges in the management of Brazilian infrastructure. These extreme events have the potential to damage structures, paralyze operations, and compromise the transport of cargo and passengers in ports, airports, and waterways. Therefore, mitigating damages requires going beyond emergency actions: it is necessary to identify risks, plan responses, and pre-define responsibilities for prevention, infrastructure recovery, and service continuity.
This planning involves complementary instruments. The risk matrix establishes how responsibilities are distributed between the public authority and the concessionaire. Insurance helps cover losses foreseen in policies. Contingency plans, in turn, organize the measures to be adopted in an emergency, from protecting people and facilities to resuming operations.
The combination of these instruments helps ensure that contracts consider the characteristics of each undertaking and the possible effects of extreme events. It also allows anticipating situations where losses exceed insurance limits or cases where a certain risk does not have available coverage in the market.
Risks and responsibilities
One of the available instruments is economic-financial rebalancing, which allows evaluating situations where events foreseen in contractual rules alter the economic conditions of the concession. Its application depends on the analysis of the specific case and compliance with contractual and legal requirements; it does not occur automatically in the face of any climatic event.
Complementary mechanisms can also be provided to deal with risks that cannot be fully insured, such as reserve funds and loss sharing. The prior definition of criteria and responsibilities helps organize the response to exceptional situations and reduces uncertainty about how losses will be handled.
Therefore, the preparation of contracts needs to take into account the specific risks of each mode and the necessary measures to maintain or recover services.
Project structuring
To improve this planning, the Ministry of Ports and Airports (MPor) has proposed guidelines for the management of insurance and risks in infrastructure concessions. The initiative is under public consultation and foresees that the feasibility studies of the undertakings include a specific assessment of risks and the availability of coverage in the insurance market.
The proposal also foresees that insurance costs will be estimated based on market information and that risks will be classified according to their characteristics and coverage possibilities. For situations where insurance is not available, the draft establishes specific procedures and admits alternative mitigation instruments, without automatically transferring responsibility to the public authority.
The guidelines cover concessions and other modalities of private exploration of port, airport, and waterway infrastructure. The proposal also foresees that regulatory agencies adapt the guidelines to the particularities of each sector.
