List

Last month I spent a week in Nepal setting up an exciting project with collaborators at Kathmandu Living Labs. The project is funded through a “Collaborative Data Innovations for Sustainable Development” award by the World Bank and Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. Our proposal focused on better understanding the ways in which disaster impact is currently measured, and how it could be improved to foster more effective and equitable disaster recovery. There are two main aspects to this: (1) improving the statistical accuracy of post-disaster impact assessment using more and better data (e.g. remote-sensing, crowd-sourcing, rapid field surveys) and better statistical modeling; and (2) defining better metrics of disaster-induced vulnerability and need.

We focus on metrics because the specific ways in which we measure the impact of disasters shapes the way that response and recovery are orchestrated. In numerous large-scale disasters including the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, we witnessed that early damage assessments often fall short in properly describing the scale and geographic distribution of damage. More importantly, we saw that the way that disaster impact is measured is in itself problematic.

By describing impact purely as a measure of damage and loss to physical assets (e.g. number of houses and bridges destroyed, etc), this focuses attention (and funding) on communities that have lost the most, but not necessarily those that need the most. Seen another way, measuring impact in terms of counting assets that have been damaged focuses attention away from those who had lost little simply because they had few assets to lose (typically the poorest and most vulnerable). In this way we saw that disasters not only reflect inequality (since the poor tend to live in more precarious conditions), but disaster recovery can often deepen inequality further.

This does not arise from malicious intent from anyone involved, but simply as an outcome of the way we measure and build our databases of disaster impact. So to correct this, we’d like to change the way we measure disaster impacts: shifting from disaster-induced damage to disaster-induced vulnerability and need.

This latest trip was my first time back to Nepal since immediately following the April 2015 earthquake. Following the earthquake I was working with the World Bank to support various Nepali government agencies on developing the early plans for recovery, and organising the housing sector analysis for the Post-Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA). In part, this new projects aims at addressing some of the limitations of the work I had done then. I won’t attempt to comment on the reconstruction progress three years later. I spent the entire week in Kathmandu while most of the earthquake damage was in the rural areas, and even so one week is much too short to say anything beyond generalizations. So I’ll save that for some future post.

For now I just wanted to share my excitement for this project and working on it with the team at Kathmandu Living Labs. Spending time with the team was quite inspiring. They are a incredibly dynamic group, passionate about improving the society they live in by combining data, people and technology. They are building Open Government platforms to increase effectiveness and transparency of local government; developing citizen-engagement apps to promote citizen-government collaboration and deliberation; mapping hazards and risks of municipalities to promote their resilience; training government surveyors on housing reconstruction monitoring; etc. What better people to partner with on this project?

The project includes other eminent collaborators. Led by the Earth Observatory of Singapore (my academic home), the project also brings together engineers from the Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative, disaster informatics experts from GFDRR (Robert Soden), data scientists from the World Bank Big Data Program, humanitarian data specialists from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, and remote sensing experts from NASA-JPL.

Stay tuned for more as the project evolves.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

  Posts

1 2
March 15th, 2019

10 Years of Earth Challenge

With all the hype since the beginning of 2019 around the #10yearchallenge, I gave an optional assignment to my students […]

January 12th, 2019

Remaining Earthquake Risk in Southern Haiti

Updating a post I had written 2 years ago. Still relevant. Today marks the 9th year since the Southern part […]

December 2nd, 2018

Informing Equitable Disaster Recovery: More than just economic losses

By Sabine Loos About a month ago, I was standing in front of a small conference room presenting to a […]

June 12th, 2018

Rapid Assessment of Disaster-Induced Vulnerability in Nepal – Report from 1st Planning Trip

Last month I spent a week in Nepal setting up an exciting project with collaborators at Kathmandu Living Labs. The […]

April 19th, 2018

Before the Great San Francisco Bay Area Earthquake

Before the Great San Francisco Bay Area Earthquake Today is the 112th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, an […]

September 11th, 2017

“Natural Hazards, Un-natural Disasters” – On Hurricane Irma, Harvey and Others

There is no such thing as a natural disaster, only natural hazard. That’s because the impact of hurricanes, earthquakes and […]

February 20th, 2017

Darwin’s account of the 1835 earthquake in Concepción, Chile

On Feb 20th 1835, a large earthquake (estimated M8.1-8.2) shook the cities of Concepción and Talcuahano in Chile, and generated […]

January 13th, 2017

Remaining Risk 7 yrs After the Haiti Earthquake

Today marks the 7th year since the Southern part of Haiti was shook by a devastating 7.0M earthquake. The earthquake […]

April 18th, 2016

110 years ago today: the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire

110 years ago today (April 18th 1906), the San Francisco Bay Area shook violently from the magnitude 7.8 rupture of […]

February 26th, 2015

Remaining Earthquake Risk of Port-au-Prince, Haiti – Updated maps with Google Earth Engine

In a previous post I shared some of my research on the remaining earthquake risk of Port-au-Prince in Haiti. The main […]