Vision

The many challenges faced by disaster risk reduction worldwide include typically a lack of standards for assessing risks and the fact that fundamental datasets such as population, infrastructure and scientific hazard information is not generally easy to access. Although tools are only a means towards the broader goal of making communities safer open source web mapping tools and related initiatives could become integral in addressing these challenges because they facilitate open information exchange, they interoperate and they are accessible.

Risiko - Risk in a Box - is intended to be a simple scenario based impact modelling tool for use in disaster management:

At its simplest, a disaster scenario consists of three components:

• Maps of hazard levels (e.g. water depth, water velocity, ground acceleration, volcanic ash load, etc) derived from mathematical modelling of the physical process behind the hazard in question.
• Maps of population and/or infrastructure exposed to the disaster.
• Formulas for estimating the impact on communities given the hazard and the exposed elements. These formulas are often referred to as vulnerability, fragility or damage curves.

With the ability to access spatial data in a standardised way the vision is to codify risk assessment standards into a system as follows:

• Each scientific agency responsible for modelling and mapping individual hazards would make their hazard maps available using a standards based web hosting e.g. based on GeoServer.
• Agencies responsible for hosting population and infrastructure information would do the same (and this information might well have come from a crowd sourcing initiative)
• The agency responsible for defining the guidelines would publish Risiko, the damage curves and the web user interface.

Each jurisdiction responsible for mapping the risk to a community according to published guidelines would then connect to the risk mapping tool and select hazard map, exposure data and regions of interest.

The server would then perform what is really a very simple calculation applying hazard levels to each exposed element according to the appropriate damage curve, aggregate this information to the selected regions and present a colour coded map of the estimated impact by the selected event.

Obviously, the devil is in the detail and even more so in the political nature of disaster management as well as IP issues with the underlying data. However, if such as system already exists or can be built as a prototype, we believe it would be critical in opening the conversation with the agencies involved and to communicate the vision to a non-technical audience.