Technological Advances and Challenges for Operational Post-Disaster Damage Assessment

The Haiti earthquake marks a new era in the way ICT is used in operational crisis management-CM. The rapid advances in ICT technology i.a. Earth Observation, are impacting the quality and quantity of information during the emergency response and recovery phases. These advances mean we must pay more attention on striking a balance between facilitating the work of humanitarian relief, emergency rescue and recovery communities, and the risk of having less knowledge at the expense of more information.

In Haiti alone, hundreds of email messages were exchanged amongst the disaster response community; through crowd source technology, hundreds of volunteers were mobilised globally to rapidly assess the level of building damage; hundreds of information map products were produced by various entities; high-quality imagery available in near real-time was a key factor in the success of the Haiti response.

Haiti showed that in addition to the contributions of traditional communities engaged in crisis response, its citizens also made contributions towards damage assessment, thereby shifting the familiar balance from impacted communities at the receiving end of aid and information, to one in which impacted communities are empowered and actively engaged in the CM process. The crowd sourcing/social media and collaborative analysis/mapping technologies used in Haiti mark the start of a new era in crisis management.  The era of “citizen or community crisis management”. Time will tell if the new marriage between technology and the citizen has a sustainable future.

Today, the CM community lives in an increasingly complex information and technological world.  Interactive/real-time and high quality information and platforms are edging in on traditional damage assessment methods, but many challenges and problems have to be solved before traditional methods become relics of the past. We cannot afford to have less effective responsiveness/recovery from disasters, whilst advances in technologies and the way they are used outweigh the benefits they can bring.

The trilateral technical partnership between the European Commission-Joint Research Centre, UNITAR/UNOSAT and the World Bank is making a notable joint effort to ensure that future damage assessments for post-disaster response and recovery are consistent, combinable and trustable.  The effort includes establishing standard operating procedures, standard damage definitions and scale based on remotely-sensed imagery, and validation protocols. Validation and Trusted analysis are more critical than before to creating value and trust in knowledge in operational crisis management.