Disaster Response Starts with a Map

Natural disaster can be defined as any occurrence causing decay of usability and productivity of land and structures built upon it, and injury or loss of human life. Disasters also have longer-term consequences for economic growth, development and poverty reduction - disaster, poverty and development are intertwined. Disasters can considerably set back development efforts by making financiers reluctant to invest, further limiting development of the area.

Blaming the Poor
Rising sea levels today commonly agreed to result from man-induced global warming make coastal cities vulnerable to future calamities, especially in developing countries. Here one in every two large cities is vulnerable to natural disaster, with Asia most at risk: between 1991 and 2000 Asia accounted for 83% of the world population affected by disasters. Irrespective of country, it is usually low-income people who are most grimly hit, as they occupy vulnerable places. It is a striking and bitter truth that in some countries the poor are even being blamed as instigator of the evil. In India, for example, slum-dwellers have been criticised for building illegally in high-risk spaces, resulting in damage to property of the elite. Whilst much flood damage could have been avoided had profit-driven expansion in buildings and concrete infrastructure been properly accompanied by repair and modernisation of the city’s outdated drainage system.

R-Stage
Disaster management involves pre-disaster and post-disaster activities. The first include:
1. Recording the sensitivity of the region to certain types of catastrophes.
2. Risk-reduction: making provisions to reduce the region’s vulnerability to catastrophes.
3. Readiness: planning emergency aid and development of scenarios and monitoring systems.
Post-disaster activities include:
4. Response to save lives: injured people provided with medical and nursing care, food support and provisional housing.
5. Recovery: revitalising and reconstructing the area: rebuilding housing, reconstructing roads and railways.

Turnaround
With steady global population growth the occurrence of natural disasters will by definition accelerate year by year. The rise over recent decades has been substantial and will not stop as long as populations grow and people migrate to cities, many vulnerable to flood or earthquake. This reality requires a turnaround in the mind-set of politicians in many countries. Often, relief efforts begin only in the aftermath, while disaster-management systems are not, or not properly, in place. But prevention is better than cure. Governments should change their attitude and take preventative measures, working towards risk reduction. We need to abandon the social and economic preconception that disasters and the associated suffering are inevitable and unavoidable.

Acknowledging GI
It is possible to reduce potential damage by developing disaster early-warning strategies. It is also possible to reduce the negative effects of post-disaster trauma by having available response and recovery plans - and the means and resources in place to carry them out. Taking appropriate action in each of the above R stages requires the right information at the right time and with the right persons. To date, geo-information technologies (GIS, Remote Sensing, GPS, LBS, mobile mapping etc.) are able to collect, process and disseminate timely, accurate and detailed geo-information at any of the above stages and at all geographical scales. A great deal would already have been gained had more politicians acknowledged the suitability of geo-information technologies as a means for efficient disaster management, taking into account that the appropriateness of geo-information depends on three factors. (1) The type of disaster (flood, fire, explosion), (2) for which of the above five stages the information is needed, and (3) geographical scale of the disaster: local, zonal, national, regional, continental or global. In the meantime, researchers have acknowledged their own responsibility, initiating research into a variety of challenging disaster-management issues. These include development of systems for integrating in nearly real time space-borne, airborne and ground-based images and other (geo-)data, building interfaces between disaster-management systems and others such as intelligent traffic, intelligent building and safety-management systems, developing methods for multi-resolution and multi-temporal representation of (3D) geo-data, developing easy-to-understand interfaces for mobile devices operated by rescue teams, and so on.

New Column
GIM International, as the leading global geomatics journal, also acknowledges its responsibility. We thus regularly publish articles on geo-information and disaster management and, starting with this issue, we are introducing a new platform for all those involved in policies and developing and using geo-information technology for disaster-management purposes to share their work, ideas and achievements. The chosen format is a monthly column and we kick off with Prof. Michael F Goodchild, University of California Santa Barbara, US, who needs no further introduction. His contribution is inspired by a report released in January 2007 by the US National Research Council: Successful Response Starts with a Map: Improving Geospatial Support for Disaster Management. Although we will invite authors, any contributions are welcome. Editorial co-ordinator for the column will be Dr Sisi Zlatanova, email: s.zlatanova@tudelft.nl. Thanks, Sisi, for your enthusiastic response to my request; please feel free to contact Sisi or me to discuss your proposal.