Platform to assess the heterogeneity of disaster risk.

Disasters triggered by natural hazards such as floods, cyclones and earthquakes are known to affect people in different ways. People’s choices regarding locations and residence types, occupations and livelihood, as well as other demographic factors, such as age and gender, are known to affect post-disaster recovery.

Yet, very few countries globally have standardized ex-ante evaluation methods to explore such disaster risk heterogeneity and the existent vulnerability assessment methods tend to produce ad-hoc results that hinder coordinated disaster risk management efforts at the national and regional levels. Visualise is a new bottom-up catastrophe risk assessment method built on widely available data such as nationwide household surveys and global cyclone wind-speed estimates, which could explore the heterogeneity of disaster risk at different spatial scales. Using an open-source r-shiny platform and various simulation and data-mining techniques,Visualise allows end-users to explore cyclone risk through the following three assessments.

Visualise-screenshot © IIASA
Visualise-screenshot2 © IIASA
  • Module 1 National Overview: provides visualization of various development indicators and past records of cyclone events. It also provides estimated cyclone windspeeds at different return periods.
  • Module 2 Provincial Simulation: provides cyclone risk simulation at the provincial level. A user can explore the heterogeneity of potential building damage as estimated by the bottom-up catastrophe modeling and conduct data mining analysis.
  • Module 3 Poverty and Equity Analysis: provides poverty and equity analysis in which a user can explore pre- and post-cyclone shock poverty and equity indicators.