Empowering local governments to make a disaster resilient built environment within Sri Lankan Cities

Urban areas are growing very rapidly all over the world, particularly in developing countries. As a result of rapid urbanisation, the world’s population is increasingly concentrated in large cities leading to unplanned urban development with inappropriate and poor quality housing, infrastructure and services. This excessive unplanned urban growth leads to various physical, social and economic vulnerabilities. As a result, the consequences of disasters are highly detrimental when they occur in urban environments. Thus, it has become necessary to strengthen the resilience of cities to disasters. The built environment provides a core to many human activities and plays a critical role in any city. Thus, it is necessary to develop the built environment with an effective degree of resilience, in order to withstand and adapt to the threats of disasters. This requires a serious effort to be made by various stakeholders including governmental and non-governmental institutions. As local governments are responsible for local area development, they have a key role to play in achieving the resilience of the cities under their jurisdiction. Even though there is a growing concern on the role of the local governments in making cities resilient, several incidents have been reported on the inadequate contribution of local governments in taking the lead role of initiating risk reduction. In this context, the research aims to explore and propose mechanisms to empower the local governments to make cities resilient to disasters within the context of the built environment. Accordingly this paper intends to analyse the challenges faced by the Sri Lankan local governments in creating a disaster resilient built environment within their cities and to propose the ways and means of addressing the challenges faced by the local governments. As such, the paper proposes a set of recommendations to empower the Sri Lankan local governments in facilitating city resilience building initiatives in the built environment contex

Smartphone sensing platform for emergency management

The increasingly sophisticated sensors supported by modern smartphones open up novel research opportunities, such as mobile phone sensing. One of the most challenging of these research areas is context-aware and activity recognition. The SmartRescue project takes advantage of smartphone sensing, processing and communication capabilities to monitor hazards and track people in a disaster. The goal is to help crisis managers and members of the public in early hazard detection, prediction, and in devising risk-minimizing evacuation plans when disaster strikes. In this paper we suggest a novel smartphone-based communication framework. It uses specific machine learning techniques that intelligently process sensor readings into useful information for the crisis responders. Core to the framework is a content-based publish-subscribe mechanism that allows flexible sharing of sensor data and computation results. We also evaluate a preliminary implementation of the platform, involving a smartphone app that reads and shares mobile phone sensor data for activity recognition.Comment: 11th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management ISCRAM2014 (2014

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

Building a Socio-technical Perspective of Community Resilience with a Semiotic Approach

Situated in the diversity and adversity of real-life contexts facing crisis situations, this research aims at boosting the resilience process within communities supported by digital and social technology. In this paper, eight community leaders in different parts of the world are invited to express their issues and wishes regarding the support of technology to face social challenges. Methods and artefacts based on the Organisational Semiotics (OS) and the Socially-Aware computing have been applied to analyse and consolidate this data. By providing both a systemic view of the problem and also leading to the identification of requirements, the analysis evidences some benefits of the OS-based approach to consolidate perspectives from different real-life scenarios towards building a socio-technical solution

Towards a Resilient Future: Experiences with Community Managed Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation

This testimony shows the urgency of the problems faced by people on the front line of climate change, which is exposing more and more people to increased risk of dis This testimony shows the urgency of the problems faced by people on the front line of climate change, which is exposing more and more people to increased risk of diaster and directly affecting their lives and livelihoods. Tragically, the global community turns a blind eye to the severity of the risks posed by climate change and is doing too little to help people prepare themselves for these risks. Community managed disaster risk reduction (CMDRR) is an effective strategy of addressing the impacts and effects of climate change and reducing communities' vulnerability to disasters

Policy into practice: Adoption of hazard mitigation measures by local government in Queensland:A collaborative research project between Queensland University of Technology and Emergency Management Queensland in association with Local Government of Queensland Disaster Management Alliance

The focus of the present research was to investigate how Local Governments in Queensland were progressing with the adoption of delineated DM policies and supporting guidelines. The study consulted Local Government representatives and hence, the results reflect their views on these issues. Is adoption occurring? To what degree? Are policies and guidelines being effectively implemented so that the objective of a safer, more resilient community is being achieved? If not, what are the current barriers to achieving this, and can recommendations be made to overcome these barriers? These questions defined the basis on which the present study was designed and the survey tools developed.\ud \ud While it was recognised that LGAQ and Emergency Management Queensland (EMQ) may have differing views on some reported issues, it was beyond the scope of the present study to canvass those views.\ud \ud The study resolved to document and analyse these questions under the broad themes of: \ud \ud • Building community capacity (notably via community awareness).\ud • Council operationalisation of DM. \ud • Regional partnerships (in mitigation/adaptation).\ud \ud Data was collected via a survey tool comprising two components: \ud \ud • An online questionnaire survey distributed via the LGAQ Disaster Management Alliance (hereafter referred to as the “Alliance”) to DM sections of all Queensland Local Government Councils; and\ud • a series of focus groups with selected Queensland Councils\u

empathi: An ontology for Emergency Managing and Planning about Hazard Crisis

In the domain of emergency management during hazard crises, having sufficient situational awareness information is critical. It requires capturing and integrating information from sources such as satellite images, local sensors and social media content generated by local people. A bold obstacle to capturing, representing and integrating such heterogeneous and diverse information is lack of a proper ontology which properly conceptualizes this domain, aggregates and unifies datasets. Thus, in this paper, we introduce empathi ontology which conceptualizes the core concepts concerning with the domain of emergency managing and planning of hazard crises. Although empathi has a coarse-grained view, it considers the necessary concepts and relations being essential in this domain. This ontology is available at https://w3id.org/empathi/

Skills for multiagency responses to international crises

Overview Australian responses to international, complex emergencies and humanitarian crises, generated by natural disaster, conflicts or incidents, demand the coordinated responses of multiple civil-military-police actors and agencies. A scoping study of Australian government agency training needs in the latter half of 2013 indicated that stakeholder agencies continue to have difficulty in identifying and developing individual skills to enable people to operate effectively in a high-pressure crisis environment that requires an integrated civil-military-police response. Agencies highlighted the need to develop a ‘whole-of-government’ set of skills for civil-military-police interaction that would complement agency specific skills. In 2015, the Australian Civil-Military Centre (ACMC) commissioned Sustineo to undertake a project to address this gap. This report, based on Sustineo’s research and consultations, goes some way to identifying the skills needed for effective civil-military-police interaction. However, the list is not exhaustive. In fact, the report highlights the difficulty of articulating a specific set of multiagency, cross-cutting skills for civil-military-police interaction. Practitioners gave consistent advice that specific skills were less important than other factors in successful civil-military-police interaction. Skills and training are only one component of success. The factors that can facilitate and enhance civil-military-police interaction and the strategies required to address those factors are much broader. The report highlights some of these broader factors and how they interrelate. It identifies the interdependence of individual knowledge, skills and attributes, the value of building relationships, the importance of tolerance and understandings of difference and the need for trust and credibility. The report concludes that an individual’s ability to operate effectively in a civil-military-police environment is developed both prior to and during a mission or deployment and relates more to the type of person and their relationships than to specific skills. Generic skills and attributes for effective civil-military-police interaction Common and shared goals Situational awareness Understanding of whole-of-government Personal attributes such as flexibility, resilience and working in a team Professional skills, such as negotiation, mediation, conflict management and partnership brokering Existing professional relationships and networks Trust Self-awareness (and social and emotional intelligence) Tolerance of diversity (including of organisational differences and cultural diversity). The report identifies considerations for developing people for deployments and it is hoped that these will inform agencies’ training and development strategies. The findings support the ongoing work that the ACMC is undertaking to develop an Australian Government Preparedness Framework (the Framework). The Framework will draw together several streams of work that are interrelated, including this report, to further build Australia’s whole-of-government effectiveness in responding to disasters and complex emergencies overseas