admin January 22nd, 2012
Welcome to 2012. However, this year is unlikely to be better than 2011.
The thing about major disasters is that whilst we don’t know exactly where the next one is going to hit, we can be certain that there will be a next one – and even take some well-informed guesses about where it might hit.
admin December 7th, 2011
European Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva warned yesterday that the Sahel region of West Africa was in danger of slipping into famine and that help should be provided now – indeed it was already being provided by the EU.
She said that it was not only ethically and morally right to send aid now, before things reached crisis point, but also cheaper in the long run as disaster risk reduction (DRR) is dramatically more cost-effective than responding to disasters.
admin November 11th, 2009
We’ve written here before about the role that planning, data analysis and prediction can play in reducing the impact of natural disasters.
The EM-DAT database (a WHO initiative) is a huge repository of information about disasters that has been built up over more than 40 years, and Advance Aid has already been mining this data to help develop its business plan – if you can use historical data to predict where disasters are most likely to happen, you can certainly fine-tune your pre-positioning and warehousing strategy.
Now SciDevNet has produced a whole section of its website devoted to covering “Remote Sensing for Natural Disasters” .