Today, humanitarian action is moving from reactive to proactive. Rather than taking action only after a disaster has hit, the humanitarian community is increasingly focusing on preventive and migitative activities. In practice, this means hazard monitoring, risk and vulnerability analysis, and appropriatea action for preparedness and risk reduction.
Considering the complexity of different environmental, climate-related and socio-political factors, it can be difficult to decide, when and how to engage in disaster preparedness and early action. As an additional important aspect, we need to consider the vulnerability, resilience and coping capacity of the communities at risk.
To make this work easier, we have a number platforms dedicated for risk watch, early warning and vulnerability monitoring. Here is a brief overview of such platforms.
RiX brings together open-source global and national risk data, with an aim to harmonize the risk and vulnerability information, facilitating a smoother risk analysis and subsequent decision making process.
The risk and impact models are built on multiple datasets including global and local weather patterns, climate change effects, local hazards, exposure and vulnerabilities.
DisasterAlert is a free-to-use service by the PDC, featuring both automatized and manually entered disaster risk and early warning data around the world. The disaster-specific risk and vulnerability models are generated using multiple datasets from national and international actors.
The HazardBrief page provides a brief summary of the key figures including the exposure area, exposed population (with the sex and age disaggregated statistics where available), estimated assets damage and the overall risk and vulnerability score of each affected country.
Thanks to the global coverage, DisasterAlert is also suitable for regional and global-scale decision making.
In the current version, the IFRC Go brings together data from two principal sources: Field reports from the National Red Crescent Societies and automated Orange and Red Alerts from GDACS.
Human-written field reports from the National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies inform about new and potential emergencies, associated risks and related action. This complemensts the automatized and robot-captured observations from the other platforms.
The more sophisticated Go Risk Module will be published in 2022.