Modelling Exposure through Earth Observation Routines (METEOR) for Developing Countries: Increasing Availability and Access to More Robust Risk Information
Abstract
The escalating impacts of natural hazards are caused mostly due to increasing exposure of populations and assets. A major challenge when making Disaster Risk Management (DRM) decisions is poor understanding of the distribution and character of exposure in emerging countries. Exposure needs to be mapped, monitored and modelled by Governments, NGOs, communities and insurers, seeking to understand risk, bolster resilience and growth. Despite recent scientific advancements in the characterization of the built environment and development of hazard models, economic and human losses due to natural disasters continue to increase. Loss estimation has long played a key role in developed countries as a powerful tool to reduce impacts of disasters. Several disciplines are critical to loss estimation. To assess risk, you need hazard, vulnerability, and exposure. There has been no formal discipline around the development of exposure, and this has resulted in a "patchwork" data fusion approach where GIS analysts aggregate "the best available data". This skews risk drastically towards known and inventoried assets, underrepresenting those that are most vulnerable. In emerging countries, the impact is much more pronounced where populations are not well recorded. This situation is inadequate for prioritizing mitigation and the regional distribution of resources for natural disasters. The UK Space Agency International Partnership Programme funded project, METEOR, will facilitate uptake of EO-based exposure data by developing protocols and standards to allow qualitative and quantitative assessment of exposure. These protocols and standards will be developed for broad application to 47 of the least developed countries and will be tested and validated in Nepal and Tanzania to assure they are fit-for-purpose. Better-informed DRM decisions that meet the demands of international frameworks (e.g. UN SDGs, Sendai Framework) will be underpinned by the national-scale data. This paper focuses on national scale EO-derived exposure databases, standards of quantitative assessment of exposure, with explicit uncertainties. It will also discuss sustainability and capacity building plans for METEOR products within the context of risk management (public, private, and non-profit sectors) in developing countries.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMNH52B..03G
- Keywords:
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- 4306 Multihazards;
- NATURAL HAZARDSDE: 4313 Extreme events;
- NATURAL HAZARDSDE: 4326 Exposure;
- NATURAL HAZARDSDE: 4333 Disaster risk analysis and assessment;
- NATURAL HAZARDS