Data that can save lives

Data that can save lives

Article

1. Haoliang Xu, Assistant Secretary-General of the UN, observes that Data can be used to reduce the impact of natural disaster.

Important Analysis

2. Data of vulnerable population can be used to pursue ‘risk-informed development’.

• Road infrastructure can be built by calculating the intensity of floods and determining the types of materials needed to construct durable roads.

3. With such valuable information, governments can anticipate disasters and reduce risks through preventive measures such as early warning systems, safety drills, and resilient infrastructure.
4. Data also help identify the gaps and makes recommendations on where to allocate resources to mitigate risks from disasters.
5. Big data also provides a deeper understanding about how disaster in an economy can trigger chain impact across several industries and services, such as transportation, rice-trading, packaging and retail.
6. India recently embarked on an initiative to establish a comprehensive disaster database system.
7. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), working with partners, has established National Disaster Loss and Damage databases in 16 countries.
8. UNDP has partnered with various institutions to gather and crunch ‘big data’ to meet the ambitious targets of the Sendai Framework to reduce the risks from disasters.
9. UNDP partnered with the Tohoku University and Fujitsu to create a Global Centre for Disaster Statistics (GCDS).
10. Fujitsu’s cloud-based ecosystem captures data from a variety of sources, including unstructured sources like social media, high-resolution satellite imagery and drones.
11. Specialised technical institutions like the Tohoku University can crunch and analyse these data sets to provide insights for policymakers about the impacts of disasters. This includes helping to monitor recovery, focussing on early warning, and assessing resilience.