Workshop on Risk Management Capability Assessment

The Decision No 1313/2013/EU on a Union Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM) aims to promote a culture of prevention and preparedness, emphasising the development of capacities to deal with risk. To that end, Member States should share with the European Commission the results of their national risk assessments and of the assessment of their Risk Management Capability every three years. In order to support countries in the latter, the Risk Management Capability Assessment Guidelines (Commission Notice 2015/C 261/03) propose a flexible methodology to evaluate the administrative, technical and financial capacities of countries to carry out risk assessments and plan and implement risk prevention and preparedness measures. The workshop held in Ispra (Italy) on the 14th and 15th December was a space for Member States to share and discuss their experiences in the evaluation of capabilities, through the analysis of three case studies: flood events, epidemic events and climate change adaptation (as part of the initiative "Covenant of Mayors").JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

Loss Database Architecture for Disaster Risk Management

The reformed Union civil protection legislation (Decision on a Union Civil Protection Mechanism), which entered into force on 1 January 2014, is paving the way for more resilient communities by including key actions related to disaster prevention such as developing national risk assessments and the refinement of risk management planning. Under the Decision, Member States agreed to “develop risk assessments at national or appropriate sub- national level and make available to the Commission a summary of the relevant elements thereof by 22 December 2015 and every three years thereafter”. The Decision also requires Member States, together with the Commission, to develop guidelines on the content, methodology, and structure of risk management capability assessments. The Commission has published risk assessment and risk mapping guidelines to assist Member States with their national risk assessments. Risk management capability assessment guidelines were also developed. The recent Communication from the Commission "Strengthening EU Disaster Management: rescEU -Solidarity with Responsibility" COM(2017) 773 final calls "Member States and Commission to promote more systematic collection and dissemination of loss data, to enhance the collection of loss data and make use of loss data for optimised prevention and climate adaptation planning". Systematically collected, comparable and robust disaster damage and loss data are an essential element of the risk assessment and management processes. Thus, the Council Conclusions on risk management capability call on the Commission to 'Encourage the development of systems, models or methodologies for collecting and exchanging data on ways to assess the economic impact of disasters on an all-hazard basis.' The current practice in disaster loss data recording across the EU shows that there are hardly any comparable disaster damage and loss data: differences exist in the methods of data recording as well as in the governance approaches to managing disaster damage and loss data. The lack of standards for damage and loss data collection and recording represent the main challenge for damage and loss data sharing and comparison, especially for cross-border cooperation within the EU. This report is based on an accurate analysis of several databases developed following a diversified number of purposes to collect, record and aggregate information regarding losses occurred after a shock triggered by different hazards. The report proposes a common structure of a generic database able to accommodate and properly record the required particularities of a vast variety of events triggered by any kind of hazard.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

INFORM Index for Risk Management: Concept and Methodology, Version 2017

This is the forth report of the revised INFORM’s concept and methodology. INFORM is a composite indicator that identifies countries at risk of humanitarian crisis and disaster that would overwhelm national response capacity. The INFORM index supports a proactive crisis and disaster management framework.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

INFORM Covid-19 Risk Index

The INFORM COVID-19 Risk Index is an experimental adaptation of the INFORM Epidemic Risk Index and aims to identify: “countries at risk from health and humanitarian impacts of COVID-19 that could overwhelm current national response capacity, and therefore lead to a need for additional international assistance”. It can be used to support prioritization of preparedness and early response actions for the primary impacts of the pandemic, and identify countries where secondary impacts are likely to have the most critical humanitarian consequences. The main scope of the INFORM COVID-19 Risk Index is global and regional risk-informed resource allocation, i.e. where comparable understanding of countries’ risk is important. It cannot predict the impacts of the pandemic in individual countries.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

Mapping of risk web-platforms and risk data: collection of good practices

A successful DRR results from the combination of top-down, strategies, with bottom-up, methodological approaches. The top–down approach refers more to administrative directives, organizations, and operational skills linked with the management of the risk and reflects more the policy component. The bottom-up approach is linked to the analyse of the causal factors of disasters, including exposure to hazards, vulnerability, coping capacity, and reflects more the practice component. In the context of disaster science, policy and practice are often disconnected. This is evident in the dominant top-down DRM strategies utilizing global actions on one hand and the context specific nature of the bottom-up approach based on local action and knowledge. A way to bridge the gap between practice and policy is to develop a spatial data infrastructure of the type of GIS web-platforms based on risk mapping. It is a way of linking data information and decision support system (DSS) on a common ground that becomes a “battlefield of knowledge and actions”. This report presents the results of an overview of the risk web-platforms and related risk data used in risk assessment at the level of EU-28. It allows the discovery of the current advancement for risk web infrastructures and capabilities in order to establish a pool of good practices and detection of needs. The outcome of the overview shows the needs in risk web platform developments and tries to recommend capacities that should be prioritized in order to strengthen the link between risk data information and decision support system (DSS). The assessment is based on web search and outcome of diverse disaster risk workshops and conference.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

INFORM report 2020: Shared evidence for managing crisis and disaster

INFORM partners believe that the availability of shared analysis of crises and disasters can lead to better coordination of actors and better outcomes for at-risk and affected people. Specifically, INFORM creates a space and process for shared analysis that can support joint strategy development, planning and action to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from crises. This can bring together development, humanitarian and other actors to manage risk and respond better when crises do occur. This report sets out INFORM’s vision for a suite of products to support decision-making that are easy to use and open to everyone. This vision involves bringing scientific rigour to the process of analysing crises and pooling expertise to develop shared methodologies. By working together, we can reduce the investments required by individual organisations, assure the quality of our analysis and make it available for the common good.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

Imputation of missing values in the INFORM Global Risk Index

Although they have been selected on the basis of their reliability, consistency, continuity and completeness, most of indicators used in INFORM Global Risk Index do not have global coverage and neither are issued regularly every year. This results in a significant number of missing values, irregularly distributed among countries, time and indicators. The main motivations for imputing missing values arise from the need to create consistent trends that would otherwise not be possible due to the lack of data in the indicator’s time series, and to increase the reliability of the single compound release. In the presented study we focus on better understanding the patterns and mechanisms of missing values in the INFORM GRI model, and on evaluating their impact on the model’s outputs. The scope is to develop a missing data imputation strategy to be implemented in the INFORM GRI that will strongly depend on the reason why data is missing.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

INFORM GLOBAL RISK INDEX RESULTS 2018

Welcome to the report of the INFORM Global Risk Index for 2018.The INFORM Risk Index is a way to understand and measure the risk of humanitarian crises and disasters, and how the conditions that lead to them affect sustainable development. INFORM partners and other organisations continue to use INFORM products to support their prioritisation and decision-making relating to crisis and disaster prevention, preparedness and response. This is the fourth annual report of INFORM and has a special focus on how composite indices, such as INFORM, might be used to support and monitor the implementation of new development frameworks like the Sustainable Development Goals.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

Identifying challenges in Disaster Risk Reduction: Risk Data Hub for Disaster Risk Management

The Workshop on “Identifying challenges in Disaster Risk Reduction” held in Varese, Italy on 28 -29 of June 2017 aimed to improve the knowledge base on Disaster Risk Assessment (DRA) that could contribute to the potential development of the updated version of EU Guidelines for Risk Assessment and Mapping for Disaster Management. The DRMKC Risk Data Hub will become the tool for centralized collection of available knowledge, which will facilitate the identification of gaps. Challenges common to a large number of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) initiatives were identified and discussed. Challenging at local, national and international levels for top down strategies and bottom up actions for DRR is to underline the scope, importance and applicability of different methodologies, data usage and actions for different scales. With this workshop, the DRMKC planned to identify main challenges for DRR focusing the attention on two hazards: floods and drought. To accomplish its objectives, the workshop brought together: experts of flood and drought disaster risk, member states experts with experience in disaster risk assessment at national level and national Web platform developers experienced in disaster risk mapping.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

Decision Making Improvement for Disaster Risk Management (DRM) through technological support

The workshop “Decision Making Improvement for Disaster Risk Management (DRM) through technological support” was held in Bucharest, Romania on 16th of October 2019, part of the 4th DRMKC Annual Seminar. The key objective of the session was to increase the collaboration with national/regional/local authorities and other institutions, aligning the development of the tools to the needs and concerns expressed at local/national level. To accomplish its objective, the workshop brought together technical and scientific experts with end users of the platforms, who have faced the main challenges related to data, knowledge and institutional practices while offering technological support for DRM. Showcases and feedback from national authorities and institutions were presented, as they were experienced when using the platforms presented in the session: the DRMKC Risk Data Hub, GRRASP and RAPID-N. The session was divided in two parts, in the first it was presented the general characteristics and functionalities of the platforms, followed in the second part by showcases of using these platforms in various applications by the local authorities and institutions.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen