This book provides guidance to policy makers seeking to design effective monitoring systems for disaster response management. This volume describes the data needs that arise after natural disasters, assesses current data management reform efforts, and discusses the institutional preconditions and tactical and strategic steps necessary for establishing systems that work. Six country case studies elaborate lessons from the success and failures of efforts to establish innovative monitoring systems in the aftermath of disasters in Guatemala, Haiti, Indonesia, Mozambique, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
We in the United States have almost come to accept natural disasters as part of our nation's social fabric. News of property damage, economic and social disruption, and injuries follow earthquakes, fires, floods and hurricanes. Surprisingly, however, the total losses that follow these natural disasters are not consistently calculated. We have no formal system in either the public or private sector for compiling this information. The National Academies recommends what types of data should be assembled and tracked.
Initial priorities for U.S. participation in the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction, declared by the United Nations, are contained in this volume. It focuses on seven issues: hazard and risk assessment; awareness and education; mitigation; preparedness for emergency response; recovery and reconstruction; prediction and warning; learning from disasters; and U.S. participation internationally. The committee presents its philosophy of calls for broad public and private participation to reduce the toll of disasters.
No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each. One way to reduce the impacts of disasters on the nation and its communities is to invest in enhancing resilience-the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative addresses the broad issue of increasing the nation's resilience to disasters. This book defines "national resilience", describes the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters, and frames the main issues related to increasing resilience in the United States. It also provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience and outlines additional information, data, gaps, and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation's resilience to disasters. Additionally, the book's authoring committee makes recommendations about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States. Enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward. Disaster Resilience confronts the topic of how to increase the nation's resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. Increasing disaster resilience is an imperative that requires the collective will of the nation and its communities. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.
This synthesis summarizes the findings of the Global Natural Disaster Risk Hotspots project. The Hotspots project generated a global disaster risk assessment and a set of more localized or hazard-specific case studies. The synthesis draws primarily from the results of the global assessment. Full details on the data, methods and results of the global analysis can be found in volume one of Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Risk Analysis. The case studies are contained in volume two (forthcoming).
'Economic losses from natural disasters totaled $92 billion in 2015.' Such statements, all too commonplace, assess the severity of disasters by no other measure than the damage inflicted on buildings, infrastructure, and agricultural production. But $1 in losses does not mean the same thing to a rich person that it does to a poor person; the gravity of a $92 billion loss depends on who experiences it. By focusing on aggregate losses—the traditional approach to disaster risk—we restrict our consideration to how disasters affect those wealthy enough to have assets to lose in the first place, and largely ignore the plight of poor people. This report moves beyond asset and production losses and shifts its attention to how natural disasters affect people’s well-being. Disasters are far greater threats to well-being than traditional estimates suggest. This approach provides a more nuanced view of natural disasters than usual reporting, and a perspective that takes fuller account of poor people’s vulnerabilities. Poor people suffer only a fraction of economic losses caused by disasters, but they bear the brunt of their consequences. Understanding the disproportionate vulnerability of poor people also makes the case for setting new intervention priorities to lessen the impact of natural disasters on the world’s poor, such as expanding financial inclusion, disaster risk and health insurance, social protection and adaptive safety nets, contingent finance and reserve funds, and universal access to early warning systems. Efforts to reduce disaster risk and poverty go hand in hand. Because disasters impoverish so many, disaster risk management is inseparable from poverty reduction policy, and vice versa. As climate change magnifies natural hazards, and because protection infrastructure alone cannot eliminate risk, a more resilient population has never been more critical to breaking the cycle of disaster-induced poverty.
Losses of life and property from natural disasters in the United States-and throughout the world-have been enormous and the potential for substantially greater future losses looms. It is clearly in the public interest to reduce these impacts and to encourage the development of communities that are resilient to disasters. This goal can be achieved through wise and sustained efforts involving mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. Implementing such efforts, particularly in the face of limited resources and competing priorities, requires accurate information that is presented in a timely and appropriate manner to facilitate informed decisions. Substantial information already exists that could be used to this end, but there are numerous obstacles to accessing this information, and methods for integrating information from a variety of sources for decision-making are presently inadequate. Implementation of an improved national or international network for making better information available in a more timely manner could substantially improve the situation. As noted in the Preface, a federal transition team is considering the issues and needs associated with implementing a global or national disaster information network as described in the report by the Disaster Information Task Force (1997). This National Research Council report was commissioned by the transition team to provide advice on how a disaster information network could best make information available to improve decision making, with the ultimate goal of reducing losses from natural disasters. The report is intended to provide the basis for a better appreciation of which types of data and information should be generated in an information program and how this information could best be disseminated to decision makers.
Written for a broad audience this book offers a comprehensive account of early warning systems for hydro meteorological disasters such as floods and storms, and for geological disasters such as earthquakes. One major theme is the increasingly important role in early warning systems played by the rapidly evolving fields of space and information technology. The authors, all experts in their respective fields, offer a comprehensive and in-depth insight into the current and future perspectives for early warning systems. The text is aimed at decision-makers in the political arena, scientists, engineers and those responsible for public communication and dissemination of warnings.
Stefan Hochrainer develops a catastrophe risk management model. It illustrates which trade-offs and choices a country must make in managing economic risks due to natural disasters. Budgetary resources are allocated to pre-disaster risk management strategies to reduce the probability of financing gaps. The framework and model approach allows cross country comparisons as well as the assessment of financial vulnerability, macroeconomic risk, and risk management strategies. Three case studies demonstrate its flexibility and coherent approach.
Provides the fundamentals, technologies, and best practices in designing, constructing and managing mission critical, energy efficient data centers Organizations in need of high-speed connectivity and nonstop systems operations depend upon data centers for a range of deployment solutions. A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. It generally includes multiple power sources, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls (e.g., air conditioning, fire suppression) and security devices. With contributions from an international list of experts, The Data Center Handbook instructs readers to: Prepare strategic plan that includes location plan, site selection, roadmap and capacity planning Design and build "green" data centers, with mission critical and energy-efficient infrastructure Apply best practices to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions Apply IT technologies such as cloud and virtualization Manage data centers in order to sustain operations with minimum costs Prepare and practice disaster reovery and business continuity plan The book imparts essential knowledge needed to implement data center design and construction, apply IT technologies, and continually improve data center operations.
