Improving Community Capacity in Rapid Disaster Mapping: An Evaluation of Summer School

Experiences with natural disasters have intensified recent efforts to enhance cooperation mechanisms among official disaster management institutions to community participation. These experiences reveal a need to enhance rapid mapping technical assistance to be developed and shared among young scientists through a summer school. However, the question arose of how effective this summer school to be used as a tool to increase scientists’ understanding and capacity. This study sought to evaluate the extent to which human resource capacity building can be effectively implemented. The methods used for this evaluation is through observations, questionnaires and a weighted scoring based on knowledge, skills and attitudes’ criteria. The results indicate a significant improvement in knowledge (94.56%), skills (82%) and attitudes (85.20%) among the participants. Even though there are still gaps in participants’ skills, the summer school was found to be an effective way to train the young scientists for rapid mapping

Rapid mapping technique for data acquisition: The case of a summer school in the Banjarnegara district, Indonesia

Global environmental change makes us aware of the impact of natural hazards. Natural hazards are phenomena with large spatial dimensions and impacts but whose mapping and monitoring data can be recorded only by using satellite or aerial remote-imaging platforms (Poursanidis & Chrysoulakis, 2017). Given that Southeast Asia is the region in the world that is most vulnerable to disasters, it is necessary to implement capacity building for the young scientists in this region so that integrated disaster communities can be developed in their respective countries and possibly in the whole of Southeast Asia. This can be done through summer school, one of the best ways to transfer knowledge. The purpose of this article is twofold: (1) to explain the use of summer school to improve young scientists’ knowledge and understanding of rapid-mapping techniques; and (2) to perform a qualitative assessment of a summer school for rapid-mapping projects. The results of this project showed an increase in the basic science knowledge of the summer school participants (representatives of eight Southeast Asian countries) in terms of initial disaster data provision, field data acquisition using unmanned aerial vehicles, and the rapid-mapping system development design