Disasters continue to present tremendous obstacles to sustained development progress and the wellbeing of communities around the world. Key to mitigating the long-term impacts of disasters is the ability to rapidly respond and recover in ways that build resilience and protect hard-fought development gains. However, the information systems needed to support such resilient and equitable recovery are currently lacking, such that decision-makers often end up gathering evidence for recovery decisions in ad-hoc ways rather than systematically.
This project (also known as the “Informatics for Equitable Recovery Project”), led by Earth Observatory of Singapore, resulted in a study that focused on the information and the data that influence early decision-making processes after a disaster. It addressed the following SDGs: SDG 1 - No poverty, SDG 10 - Reduced inequalities, and SDG 11 - Sustainable cities & communities. The project built frameworks for developing information systems that focus on identifying not only those who are impacted but also those who are least able to recover. This would inform more equitable long-term recovery processes. Insights and tools developed were based on the Nepal 2015 earthquake. The main outcomes of the study were the following:
Proposed and provided new tools to estimate and map post-disaster building damage more accurately, integrating the multiple data-sources produced after a disaster.
Provided new insights into the diversity of recovery trajectories and the characteristics that link pre-disaster vulnerability to post-disaster recovery and need.
Developed a metric to estimate differential post-disaster needs in order to inform early decision making that fosters more effective and equitable recovery processes.
Materials to both understand and implement the tools are hosted on the project website at disaster-analytics.com/projects/ier-nepal/
Final Report (high resolution)
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