UN Study Touts ICT Role in Disaster Response

The United Nations has released a study detailing the key role of information technology in emergency response during large-scale humanitarian disasters.

The study, titled Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies, was announced last week at the Dubai International Humanitarian Aid & Development Conference 2011.

It was commissioned by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the UN Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation, in collaboration with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

The study centres on best practices and lessons learned by some 40 technology and humanitarian experts who conducted disaster response, particularly during the earthquake in Haiti last year.

It is intended to enhance coordination in future emergencies.

Ted Turner, Chairman of the United Nations Foundation, said the study was commissioned to analyse the challenges and opportunities brought by the increasingly networked world in the field of disaster response immediately after large-scale humanitarian emergencies.

“The global response to the January 2010 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti showed how connected individuals are becoming increasingly central to humanitarian emergency response and recovery,” said Turner in the foreword of the study.

“Haitians trapped under rubble used text messaging to send pleas for help. Concerned citizens worldwide engaged in a variety of ways, from sending in donations via SMS, to using shared networks to translate and map requests for assistance,” he added.

Turned noted that cloud-, crowd-, and SMS-based technologies have enabled citizens to be involved in disaster response at an unprecedented level. This was also made possible by the increasing number of mobile phone subscriptions which hit more than 5 billion globally in 2011.

“This trend toward communications driven by and centred on people is challenging and changing the nature of humanitarian aid in emergencies,” he said.

John Crowley, head of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, said the Harvard team, which was tasked with writing the study, found during the study six core challenges in technology-related emergency response, including the following:

• Mobile technologies and satellite communications are bringing everyone—humanitarian organizations, international institutions, volunteer technical communities, and the affected populations—ever closer together. More often than not, victims of disasters and conflicts have cell phones and can communicate via SMS in real time. The headquarters of various agencies are ever more closely connected to the operations in the field. And thousands of volunteers who until recently would have sent donations are now contributing mapping and crowdsourcing services.

• As a result, information flows are accelerating, raising expectations around increasing the tempo of information management and coordination in emergency operations.

• At the same time, the methods for data and information exchange are moving from document-based systems to flows of structured data via web services. This movement from the narration of ongoing events in long stretches of unstructured prose to streams of data in short, semi-structured formats require humanitarian staff to perform double duty. They are simultaneously working within an existing system based on the exchange of situation reports while filtering and analyzing high volumes of short reports arriving via SMS and web services.

• Information Management in the humanitarian system is not tooled to compile, translate, and analyze the increased messaging from an affected population, the VTCs, or the demands of headquarters. For field staff who are working in difficult circumstances in technology-hostile environments, the sense of information overload is unprecedented and increasing.

• Field staff and their managers are saying that the best method for integrating non-traditional information flows with humanitarian information management practices is to link new data flows into existing workflows and shared data standards. Adding new work flows will break the system.

• As a result, stakeholders are calling for an interface between the humanitarian system and its cluster coordination mechanism and the various new sources of information—from the disaster affected community and the volunteer/humanitarian technologists.

 FutureGov