Asia and the Pacific is among the world’s most disaster-impacted regions and the number of disasters caused by the natural hazards in the region has increased drastically in recent years. The use of ICTs during all phases of disaster risk management presents substantial opportunities to reduce disaster risks, enhance resilience, and facilitate inclusive preparedness and response.
This APDIP e-Note looks at how information and communications technology (ICT) is being used in disaster management and it provides a broad overview of the role ICT plays in the disaster management process. It examines the interplay between different ICT media and the stakeholders involved in all phases of disaster management. It also outlines why it is essential to give ICT its due place in disaster management.
In field operations of Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) services, vehicles are the most important tools. Today, the vehicles are increasingly dependent on ICT systems. PPDR responder’s need is to enhance mission critical voice with broadband data. Command and control applications aboard a vehicle are commonplace. There is a need to ease situational awareness and decision making by utilizing sensor information, such as satellite or network based position information, living video images.
During the “great east Japan earthquake” on March 11, 2011, a lot of ICT resources were completely or partially damaged due to the tremor and the resultant tsunami. As a consequence, the demand for ICT services explosively increased, mainly because the people of the affected areas were trying to communicate with the outside world that led to a phenomenal rise in the network traffic. This gave rise to a serious traffic congestion, and the emergency ICT networks and services could not deal with this issue sufficiently.
This paper describes the ICT-based work management to enhance collaborative works and interactive communication, and to grasp significant information in order to support unmanned construction for post-disaster restoration. Firstly, this paper reports the unmanned constructions that have been and are being done in the Unzen restoration project.
Malaysians are increasingly finding themselves exposed to disasters especially land slides and flood. However, concern can be raised about citizen’s preparedness of disasters. This paper discusses the level of disaster preparedness among Malaysians from a survey of 346 citizens to assess their perceptions of disaster issues, and their attitudes towards increasing the disaster preparedness.
The use of ICTs has been highly advocated for addressing the obstacles and improving decision-making in the event of a disaster. A number of ICT support systems and frameworks have evolved over time to support the highly time and collaboration intensive task of emergency and disaster management. This paper is based on a survey of the existing systems, ongoing research projects, supporting systems and concepts. These systems have been classified based on their use in the four stages of Comprehensive Emergency Management (CEM).
This paper introduces the recent extreme rainfall-induced landslide disasters and results of ring shear tests showing the triggering mechanism of rapid and long run-out landslides. It introduces an attempt of ICT-based landslide micro-topography mapping using Google Earth. Finally, it also aims to provide new participatory work and learning for creating better and reliable hazard mapping.
This e-primer introduces policy makers and development practitioners to the application of different information and communication technologies (ICTs) in disaster management, with case studies from the Asia-Pacific region.
This report examines four different issue areas to analyze how social media is used in the context of risk and crisis communication. These areas include: public safety and preparedness; emergency warnings, alerts and requests for assistance; recovery efforts; and, finally, monitoring and situational awareness. In the context of each of these areas, it highlights the key literature and real-life examples to explore the risks vs. opportunities in the utility of social media. These four areas capture the role of engagement and strategy in both the risk and crisis space.
