Disaster Management, Developing Country Communities & Climate Change: The Role of ICTs

Effective disaster response demands rapid access to reliable and accurate data and the capacity to assess, analyse and integrate information from varied sources. ICTs can obviously help, and this paper focuses on the role of ICTs in reducing the impacts of acute climate-related events.

The paper argues the centrality of the community in effective disaster management while acknowledging the important role of governments, donors, businesses, epistemic communities and NGOs. Some ICT applications in disasters are described; although the majority of applications are funded externally raises concerns about further dependency and unsustainability, but the paper argues that there are grounds for optimism.

Development of new wireless technologies; convergence of telecommunications, computing, and multi-media; multi-stakeholder partnerships; and the use of free open sourced software (FOSS) by socially minded ICT-savvy professionals are enabling greater standardisation and interoperability, more data availability, greater reach at lower costs, and to some extent transparency and accountability of disaster resource allocation and delivery.

The author recommends the following:

• the use of ICTs in community-centred disaster management can be enhanced. ICT systems should be developed that accommodate interoperation and be based around routinely-used rather than specialised applications.
• the need for integration rather than specialisation: with climate change becoming an integral part of disaster management systems rather than separately catered-for; and with generic information systems being created that encompass both disaster and development purposes.
• clarification on how ICTs can address barriers to interagency coordination and collaboration, and how the new technologies can help evaluate the effectiveness and financial performance of disaster response programmes.