Top-down and bottom-up – A global approach to strengthen local disaster resilience

Abstract

The main message of international disaster frameworks as well as the political agenda is clear: Every player in the humanitarian domain should aim for a paradigm shift from managing disasters to pro-active disaster risk management. In practice, however, this process can be very complex: Tailored technological solutions require collaborative developments and related organizational adaptions. Early warnings must be linked to early action while local communities need to be involved and trained to strengthen their disaster resilience. In collaboration with the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Deutsche Post DHL, SOS Children’s Villages International (SOS-CVI) put in place a dedicated online near real-time disaster risk management platform named Resilience360 (R360). With the overall objective of transforming the disaster management cycle into a feedback loop that aims at avoiding repetitive mistakes, R360 supports operational decision-making based on different sources of information. They range from risk indicators that direct the pre-positioning of vital resources in the most vulnerable villages to near real-time incident information on armed conflicts as well as satellite-based damage assessments to estimate the impact of natural disasters. However, the decisive strength of R360 lies in its feedback mechanism. Local staff are not only automatically notified about potential threats; they can also report incidents themselves, which, depending on their severity, are forwarded to national, regional and/or global emergency coordinators within the organization. Based on the example cyclone Dineo, a tropical category four storm that led to large-scale damages and displacements in Mozambique in February 2017, we show how SOS CVI and its partners improved their decision-support based on early warnings and the integration of satellite-based damage assessments into R360. The official rollout of R360 including dedicated training packages is planned for fall 2017.