Mitigating Disaster Impacts in Africa

The financial cost of disasters in Africa is estimated by the AU to run between 3 and 15 percent of the continent＇s GDR High vulnerability to disaster risk is thus a major challenge undermining Africa＇s accelerated and sustainable structural transformation efforts. But there is a plan in place to build resilience to disasters and reduce the risk impact,

Disaster Impacts Surveillance from Social Media with Topic Modeling and Feature Extraction: Case of Hurricane Harvey

Twitter can supply useful information on infrastructure impacts to the emergency managers during major disasters,but it is time consuming to filter through many irrelevant tweets.Previous studies have identified the types of messages that can be found on social media during disasters,but few solutions have been proposed to efficiently extract useful ones.We present a framework that can be applied in a timely manner to provide disaster impact information sourced from social media.The framework is tested on a well-studied and data-rich case of Hurricane Harvey.The procedures consist of filtering the raw Twitter data based on keywords,location,and tweet attributes,and then applying the latent Dirichlet allocation(LDA) to separate the tweets from the disaster affected area into categories(topics) useful to emergency managers.The LDA revealed that out of 24 topics found in the data,nine were directly related to disaster impacts-for example,outages,closures,flooded roads,and damaged infrastructure.Features such as frequent hashtags,mentions,URLs,and useful images were then extracted and analyzed.The relevant tweets,along with useful images,were correlated at the county level with flood depth,distributed disaster aid(damage),and population density.Significant correlations were found between the nine relevant topics and population density but not flood depth and damage,suggesting that more research into the suitability of social media data for disaster impacts modeling is needed.The results from this study provide baseline information for such efforts in the future.

A Novel Methodological Approach to Estimate the Impact of Natural Hazard-Induced Disasters on Country/Region-Level Economic Growth

With the increased frequency of extreme weather events and large-scale disasters, extensive societal and economic losses incur every year due to damage of infrastructure and private properties, business disruptions,fatalities, homelessness, and severe health-related issues. In this article, we analyze the economic and disaster data from1970 through 2010 to investigate the impact of disasters on country/region-level economic growth. We leveraged a random parameter modeling approach to develop the growth-econometrics model that identifies risk factors significantly influencing the country/region-level economic growth in the face of natural hazard-induced disasters,while controlling for country/region-and time-specific unobserved heterogeneities. We found that disaster intensity in terms of fatalities and homelessness, and economic characteristics such as openness to trade and a government's consumption share of purchasing power parity(PPP), are the significant risk factors that randomly vary for different countries/regions. Other significant factors found to be significant include population, real gross domestic product(GDP), and investment share of PPP converted GDP per capita. We also found that flood is the most devastating disaster to affect country/region-level economic growth. This growth-econometrics model will help in the policy and decision making of governmentsrelated to the investment needs for pre-and post-disaster risk mitigation and response planning strategies, to better protect nations and minimize disaster-induced economic impacts.

Forecast Service of An Extreme Rainstorm Process in Bayannur City,Inner Mongolia in 2022

On August 1,2022,a rainstorm process occurred in Bayannur City,Inner Mongolia.An extreme precipitation event occurred in Wuyuan County,Urat Middle Banner and Urat Front Banner,causing rainstorm,flood,strong convective wind and other disasters,thereby resulting in crop damage,livestock death and other losses.Meteorological departments made a series of forecast and early warning,meteorological service and basin joint prevention for the rainstorm process,set an example for dealing with the rainstorm disaster,and accumulated experience for the forecast service of rainstorm in future.

Characterizing Uncertainty in City-Wide Disaster Recovery through Geospatial Multi-Lifeline Restoration Modeling of Earthquake Impact in the District of North Vancouver

Restoring lifeline services to an urban neighborhood impacted by a large disaster is critical to the recovery of the city as a whole.Since cities are comprised of many dependent lifeline systems,the pattern of the restoration of each lifeline system can have an impact on one or more others.Due to the often uncertain and complex interactions between dense lifeline systems and their individual operations at the urban scale,it is typically unclear how different patterns of restoration will impact the overall recovery of lifeline system functioning.A difficulty in addressing this problem is the siloed nature of the knowledge and operations of different types of lifelines.Here,a city-wide,multi-lifeline restoration model and simulation are provided to address this issue.The approach uses the Graph Model for Operational Resilience,a data-driven discrete event simulator that can model the spatial and functional cascade of hazard effects and the pattern of restoration over time.A novel case study model of the District of North Vancouver is constructed and simulated for a reference magnitude 7.3 earthquake.The model comprises municipal water and wastewater,power distribution,and transport systems.The model includes 1725 entities from within these sectors,connected through 6456 dependency relationships.Simulation of the model shows that water distribution and wastewater treatment systems recover more quickly and with less uncertainty than electric power and road networks.Understanding this uncertainty will provide the opportunity to improve data collection,modeling,and collaboration with stakeholders in the future.

Financing Disaster Risk Reduction:Exploring the Opportunities,Challenges,and Threats Within the Southern African Development Community Region

The Southern African Development Community(SADC)region,a regional economic body comprised of 16 member states,is one of our planet's most vulnerable regions to natural hazards,and has a complex disaster risk profile.The region has sustained several disasters over the past decades.These events include annual floods in 2004-2019 and extreme droughts(1990-1993);other climate-induced disasters,such as cyclones,also have had devastating impacts,particularly on the Indian Ocean island states and east coast countries.To reduce the risk and impacts of dis asters,governments must invest in disaster risk reduction(DRR).However,interventions aimed at reducing social and economic vulnerability and investing in longterm mitigation activities are often few,poorly funded,and insignificant in comparison with money spent on humanitarian assistance,dis aster relief,and post-disaster reconstruction.This study investigated whether DRR is adequately funded within SADC member states in light of the high stakes in human life,infrastructure,and economic losses and the potential savings involved.The study applied a qualitative research design with data collected through semistructured interviews and focus group discussions.Respondents were selected purposefully and through snowball sampling with a total of 67 respondents from Botswana,Eswatini,Namibia,South Africa,and Zimbabwe participating in the study.The study findings reveal that DRR is inadequately funded in all the member states consulted in comparison to funding allocated to disaster response.In light of the underfunding experienced by DRR activities,this study provides a platform for lobbying and advocacy for adequate funding for DRR.

Applying Earth Observation Technologies to Economic Consequence Modeling:A Case Study of COVID‑19 in Los Angeles County,California

Earth observation(EO) technologies,such as very high-resolution optical satellite data available from Maxar,can enhance economic consequence modeling of disasters by capturing the fine-grained and real-time behavioral responses of businesses and the public.We investigated this unique approach to economic consequence modeling to determine whether crowd-sourced interpretations of EO data can be used to illuminate key economic behavioral responses that could be used for computable general equilibrium modeling of supply chain repercussions and resilience effects.We applied our methodology to the COVID-19 pandemic experience in Los Angeles County,California as a case study.We also proposed a dynamic adjustment approach to account for the changing character of EO through longer-term disasters in the economic modeling context.We found that despite limitations,EO data can increase sectoral and temporal resolution,which leads to significant differences from other data sources in terms of direct and total impact results.The findings from this analytical approach have important implications for economic consequence modeling of disasters,as well as providing useful information to policymakers and emergency managers,whose goal is to reduce disaster costs and to improve economic resilience.

Are Disasters a Risk to Regional Fiscal Balance?Evidence from Indonesia

Indonesia is an archipelago country and is fairly vulnerable to disasters. While disasters generally affect government revenue and expenditure, their effects likely vary by country. This study examines the effect of disasters on the fiscal balance, revenue, and expenditure of local governments. We used panel data and fixed effects methods to estimate the degree to which disaster severity influences budgetary solvency at the district and provincial levels in Indonesia between 2010 and 2018. This study revealed that disasters can strain fiscal balance at the district and provincial levels due to a decrease in own-source revenue and an increase in social assistance expenditure, capital expenditure, consumption expenditure, and unexpected expenditure. The district expenditure most threatened by disasters is consumption expenditure, while the provincial expenditure most threatened is unexpected expenditure. We also found that an increase in capital expenditure can lead to financial burden due to delays of planned projects or post-disaster reconstruction. Based on these findings, it is clear that some forms of insurance or other financing schemes are necessary to mitigate the adverse impacts of disasters on regional fiscal balance.

The 2023 Earthquake in Türkiye and Implications for China's Response to Catastrophe

On 6 February 2023,two 7.8 magnitude earthquakes consecutively hit south-central Türkiye,causing great concern from all governments,the United Nations,academia,and all sectors of society.Analyses indicate that there is also a high possibility of strong earthquakes with a magnitude of 7.8 or above occurring in the western region of China in the coming years.China is a country that is highly susceptible to catastrophic disasters such as earthquakes,floods,and other natural calamities,which can cause significant damages to both human life and property,as well as widespread impacts on the society.Currently,China's capacity for disaster prevention and control is still limited.In order to effectively reduce the impact of catastrophic disasters,ensure the safety of people's lives and property to the greatest extent possible,maintain social stability in high-risk areas,and ensure high-quality and sustainable regional development,it is urgent to improve the seismic resistance level of houses and critical infrastructure in high earthquake risk zones and increase the earthquake-resistant design level of houses in high-risk fault areas with frequent seismic activities;significantly enhance the ability to defend against extreme weather and ocean disasters in economically developed areas along the southeastern coast,as well as the level of fortification in response to extreme meteorological and hydrological disasters of coastal towns/cities and key infrastructure;vigorously enhance the emergency response capacity and disaster risk prevention level in western and ethnic minority regions;comprehensively improve the defense level of residential areas and major infrastructure in high geological hazard risk zones with flash floods,landslides,and mudslides;systematically promote national disaster prevention and mitigation education;and greatly enhance the societal disaster risk reduction ability,including catastrophic insurance.