Climate Exchange

[

] 212

rban

ssues

projects may be developed for adapting to climate change and

enhancing sustainability and resilience

• Economies of scale, as well as proximity and concentration

of enterprises, make it cheaper and easier to take actions and

provide services when disasters occur.

Planning for climate-related disasters

Although there is considerable uncertainty with respect to the specific

impacts of climate change, it is almost certain that climate-related

natural hazards will continue to occur, that they will impact more popu-

lations in both urban and rural areas, and that they will cause more

complex disruptions and emergencies as they impact vulnerable urban

areas in a global economy. As a result, the development and application

of new knowledge, technology and paradigms for disaster management

in anticipation of the impending changes is of the highest importance.

Among the new technologies already in use are mobile devices and

related applications, but their place in disaster management is still

developing, and certainly has not reached its full potential.

To date, most urban adaptation strategies are seriously handi-

capped by an inability to define the specific risks particular to a given

city, defaulting to general assumptions of global climate change that

lack the details needed for meaningful planning. Generic climate

change adaptation planning (CCAP) does not provide adequate

solutions. The needed solutions must be based on reliable and

actionable data that reflects the current and trending geography,

hydrometeorology, demography, socio-cultural realities, and coping

capacity of the specific urban area. At present, detailed CCAP is

an evolving science, only fully implemented in a few major urban

centres such as London, Toronto, New York City and Chicago.

assessment of the CCAP programmes in these four cities provides

several useful insights in terms of planning for effective adaptation:

• Follow a strategy of adaptive management that recognizes that

CCAP is a dynamic and inclusive ‘whole of the city’ process,

requiring inputs from all sectors with continual monitoring and

periodic adjustment

• Develop a science-based programme to define and prioritize

specific risks and develop appropriate programmes and

evaluation benchmarks

• Incorporate CCAP into broader regional planning to ensure

collaboration within and across jurisdictions, agencies and

populations and reduce ‘unexpected consequences’ resulting

from conflicts between various programmes

• Recognize and accommodate the fact that the impacts of climate

change most often fall on those with the least resources and

fewest choices in terms of dealing with risk.

Data collection, analysis and delivery

The need for new, more place-specific data and science-based plan-

ning has become urgent, driven by rapid urbanization and climate

change. The same factors are forcing the prioritization of developing

new methods of analyzing, retaining and providing access to data that

realistically reflect risks, hazards and potential impacts vastly different

from those in historical records. Thanks to advances in monitoring

and sensing and to teams willing to do the difficult and often danger-

ous field-collection and field-verification of data, new resources are

being developed. However, the unprecedented types, rates and scale of

change in technology will have to increase to keep pace with climate

change, urbanization and a skyrocketing population. Better exploita-

tion of existing technologies is of paramount importance, too.

In this context, the delivery of useable information is

at least as important as data collection. It might seem

that highly concentrated urban populations would

be ones in which the ‘last mile’ of an early warning

or evacuation order could be easily delivered. That is

often not the case. When the very poor move into and

around urban centres, they often “end up in informal

settlements where housing is unplanned, difficult to

reach and not connected to either physical or social

services.”

To overcome these challenges, innovative

technologies are needed to collect, integrate, analyse

and disseminate actionable information.

The Pacific Disaster Center (PDC) is among the inno-

vators in the development of new data and information

resources, and in the creation and advancement of a

flexible, reliable and easily accessed medium for under-

standing and sharing information. The PDC’s Disaster

All-hazards Warning, Analysis and Risk Evaluation

(DisasterAWARE), is a wide-ranging, global decision

support system. It is a mature technology that has been

developed and enhanced over more than a decade.

DisasterAWARE continually ‘listens’ to trusted hazard

data sources, and integrates impact modelling, risk

exposure and a host of other information to deliver

web- and mobile-accessible mapping and geographical

information service capabilities to the public and disas-

ter managers worldwide.

One significant advantage of DisasterAWARE is its

extreme scalability to display information not only at

global, regional or national scales, but to visualize highly

localized data in a map viewer, including the assets poten-

tially at risk and the hazards that threaten them. The value

of such an application for urban planning purposes was

first demonstrated by PDC in 2003-4 in Marikina City,

where a multi-hazard risk and vulnerability study was

done to inform development plans for an 8.3 square mile

component of Metro Manila, Philippines. The Internet-

based map viewer for the ‘Multi-hazard Risk Assessment

for Marikina City, Philippines’ allowed the user community

to see the flood and earthquake hazards, for instance, that

specifically affected City Hall. At the other end of the scale,

DisasterAWARE includes layers of global hazard risk expo-

sure such as storm and earthquake intensity zones. The

system also offers a vast archive of historical hazards, and

serves a variety of near-real-time warnings, integrated with

impact modelling and observational data. Many of the near-

real-time hazard data are also made available on iOS and

Android mobile devices through a free app, Disaster Alert.

The system does not yet incorporate the climate change

information currently being developed (impacts of rising

sea levels, infrastructure fragility etc), but the functionality

has been designed and is growing to meet such needs.

With each new release of DisasterAWARE, several times

a year, new data layers become available. As new national,

international andmultinational authorities adopt the system,

it becomes better able to respond to a wider range of needs.

For example, in 2011 the platform started offering multi-

language support and as of September 2012 supports users

with English, Vietnamese, Spanish, Indonesian, and Thai.