Opportunities for Information and Technological RecoveryAbstract

Disasters RoundtableWorkshop #34

Washington, DC

Mark PrutsalisSahana Software Foundation

Disasters have a devastating political, economic, social, and human impact on individuals and societies. As the trends of population growth and urbanization converge, the scale and impact of disasters will continue to grow. According to a recent UN and World Bank report, spending on disasters will triple to an estimated $185 billion per year by 2100. Major earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand, floods in Thailand and Australia, and tornadoes in the United States, made 2011 the costliest year ever for natural disasters. Recovery from major disasters such as these takes years, long after media attention has waned, public donations to charitable organizations have dried up, and information is no longer easily shared between those organizations with data, and those who need it.

Recent international disaster responses such as those to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti or the 2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami in Japan can inform understanding of information and technological recovery. Yet, it has been challenging to apply the international context to U.S. disaster planning because domestic organizing principles (e.g., the National Response Framework) and capabilities (e.g., a highly specialized and professionalized emergency management sector) have differed greatly from the rest of the world. But the rate of adoption of new technologies, broadband wireless, smart phones, and surprisingly resilient wireless networks has narrowed the gap between the U.S. and even the developing world.

One best practice is building information systems based on open, published and widely used data standards, which makes critical systems easier to recover and rebuild. Two years after the earthquake in Haiti, there is still no national registry of hospitals and health facilities that includes capacities and services offered — critical information to planning the recovery of the public health infrastructure. The original Ministry of Health records were transitioned to a proprietary system that was not sustainable, and succeeding efforts have not committed to an open standard flexible enough to allow support for growth in the system by multiple agencies.

Many recovery challenges can be addressed by broader information sharing agreements and MOUs established before a disaster occurs between entities with data and entities that will need it. Disasters can also serve as catalysts in greater information sharing between organizations; this provides a critical opportunity for recovery planning. During the crisis response phases of a disaster, the information floodgates open. High resolution satellite and other imagery is increasingly freely released as a public good by both government and commercial entities; during recovery, when such data is just as critical, it is no longer available because it is considered sensitive, proprietary, and highly valuable commercially.

A technical community of interest around missing and found persons information reporting is taking a proactive approach in setting up an agreement on standards and data sharing between such major stakeholders as the ICRC and American Red Cross with technology solutions providers including Google, Facebook, and Sahana. The agreed framework defines the data standards upon which systems will be built, along with agreements of what information will be allowed as sharable between organizations and procedures for how to turn on and off shared data based on governance decisions and international standards for humanitarian actions, privacy concerns and local and national laws.

Finally, one of the biggest challenges is about how to accommodate spontaneous help from the public that is of unknown quality. Social media is not a panacea for our information management and real-time awareness needs; but we do need to understand how to appropriately leverage these technologies in recovery planning. The way to address this is through methodologies to categorize, validate, verify, assign weight to information gleaned from public sources and build these measures into our decision-making support systems.