Together We Stand

[ 23 ] the deployment of InAWARE in Indonesia, as well as the expansion of DisasterAWARE to include biological/medical hazards as a result of PDC’s BioSurveillance Information Service (BioServ). Building capacity in Indonesia The State of Hawaii is partnered with Indonesia as part of the National Guard’s State Partnership Program, designed to create sister-city-like relationships. Hawaii’s National Guard, leading the effort with Indonesia, approached PDC in 2010 about collaborating with the national disaster management office (BNPB) through a series of technical exchanges and sharing of best practices. Those events, initially focused on sharing hazard data between DisasterAWARE and a BNPB internally- developed early warning application, quickly evolved into a request for their own customized version of DisasterAWARE, InAWARE. Funding support from the United States Agency for International Development and the Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance created an activity that — through part- nerships among national and provincial disaster management offices, the national meteorological and geophysical office, private sector consultants, and others — allowed PDC to deploy InAWARE. In turn, that has allowed BNPB to manage numerous disastrous floods, volcanic eruptions and wildfires. Taking partnership to a new level, recently, PDC has teamed with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and PetaJakarta. org to leverage crowdsourcing processes to include lifeline data (road networks, emergency services, shelter locations etc.) and citizen-reported flood conditions in InAWARE. BioServ In 2012, PDC was approached by key stakeholders in the disease monitoring and public health alerting community and asked if DisasterAWARE could be adapted to provide monitoring and warning for public health and infectious disease. The theory was tested in a small pilot project. After initial success, and in partnerships with the US Navy Environmental Preventive Medicine Unit 6, Naval Medical Research Unit 2, and the Army Public Health Command, the BioServ program was developed under funding from the Advanced Medical Development programme. Expanding the partnership network to include authorita- tive US and global health data sources, during subsequent years of the programme, BioServ has been expanded under three major themes: disease outbreak and human secu- rity alerts, disease background information, and country/ regional background information. All of these health data appear alongside PDC’s global risk and vulnerability indices, infrastructure, climatic, demographic, economic and geographic information layers. In the end, every project, including every enhancement or deployment of DisasterAWARE, demands partnerships and these naturally lead to new friends and more partnerships. The only way forward is together. These are only a few examples of innovative technologies and enduring partnerships focused on fostering disaster resil- ience. A broader point, however, remains: today’s world offers more means of reducing disaster risks than simply getting out of the way or living in another place. Image: PDC PDC partnered with epidemiologists and other health professionals to provide scenario-based training on BioServ during the development of the system T ogether W e S tand