Multi-hazard and risk informed system for Enhanced local and regional Disaster risk management (MEDiate)

Dealing with the aftermath of natural disasters has always been one of the biggest concerns in the world. Despite advances in developing natural hazard models and forecasting their impacts, policymakers face the big question every day: how to plan ahead and get prepared for natural disasters. The ever-changing conditions, like climate change, financial and economic changes, and evolving society’s grasp on priorities, pose an extra challenge when it comes to making decisions for mitigating and managing natural hazard risks. As in the case of climate change, a region with a history of high precipitation might experience drought in the future while another region suffers from unprecedented rainfall, which in turn can cause floods or landslides. In other words, the changing climate will raise the chance of new and unprecedented natural hazards while reducing the chance of others. In another case, following a severe crisis, society’s priorities might shift towards financial and economic criteria in decision-making to address more pressing issues. This change should be reflected in the decision-making process to address public concerns. In other words, decision-makers need to find the optimum risk mitigation solutions not only to address imminent risks but also to prepare for future hazards and adapt to new situations. On top of that, they need to take into account the multi-hazards and their interactions, as well as the cascading impacts of multi-hazard risks.

In MEDiate project, the Cooperation and Transformative Governance (CAT) group has partnered up with, Stiftelsen NORSAR, Stichting Deltares, University of Strathclyde, Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières, Eucentre Foundation, University College London, Icelandic Meteorological Office, Anglia Ruskin University Higher Education Corporation, IMT Mines Albi-Carmaux – Ècole Mines-Télécom, Haskoli Islands – University of Iceland, R2M Solution, RINA Consulting S.p.A., IUSS – Scuola Universitaria Superiore Pavia, OSLO-OSL, Essex County Council, Metropole Nice-Côte d’Azur, and Austurbru Municipality, in developing a decision-support system (DSS) to help decision-makers take all above mentioned aspects into consideration when planning for natural hazard risk mitigation. The aim of MEDiate is to develop a DSS for disaster risk management by considering multiple interacting natural hazards and cascading impacts using a novel resilient-informed, service-oriented, and people-centered approach that accounts for forecasted modifications in the hazard and exposure. 

Partners in the MEDiate project are collaborating on developing multi-hazard risk assessment models, cascading impacts, exposure models, and mitigation options that will be integrated into the state-of-the art DSS. CAT designs the MCDA module as part of DSS. The MCDA module couples the outputs from multi-hazard risk assessment models with cascading impacts, exposure models, and mitigation options with stakeholders’ priorities and preferences to help policymakers find an optimal solution. The resulting risk-informed DSS will be delivered as a user-friendly IT system, allowing end users to model and visualize potential disaster scenarios and understand how potential physical and social actions will influence the scenarios and their communities’ resilience to current and future natural hazards. As the multi-hazard risk assessment models take into account the forecasting of future hazards, the resulting DSS has the ability to adapt to new hazards and risks. Coupling the technical results with the stakeholders’ perceptions of priorities and important issues makes the DSS adaptable to changes in people's needs and shifts in priorities.

The MEDiate project is pursuing to achieve following objective:

• Improving multi-hazard assessments of natural hazards and highlighting potential trends due to climate change.
• Improving multi-hazard risk assessments accounting for interactions and trends in their components.
• Surpass the current state-of-the-art in multi-hazard and risk management by developing dynamic and future-centric risk assessment tools that cater to the decision-making requirements of diverse stakeholders, including local governments, businesses, and citizens. These tools will be integrated into the computational engine of the MEDiate’s DSS, providing sufficient flexibility that will enable different decision-makers to tailor the analyses and visualizations in line with their specific priorities.
• Providing decision makers with a means of visualizing the components of disaster risk and resilience, the stakeholders’ preferences and the effect of different actions and alternate futures on possible scenarios for an area, considering the multiple hazards that are present and how these (and other risk components) may change over time.

To ensure the practicality of the final DSS, all models and modules will be tested in Oslo (Norway), Nice (France), Essex County (UK), and Austurbrù (Iceland) test sites, with different characteristics of multi-hazard risks.

The MCDA layer of MEDiate’s DSS platform is developed to engage the local stakeholder and include them in the negotiation for determining the pressing issues and priorities. The first step of the stakeholder engagement is to understand their roles in disaster risk management and their vision of reduced disaster risk. In addition to developing the MCDA engine for MEDiate’s DSS platform, CAT’s team developed the stakeholder engagement framework to satisfy these needs. The developed framework also includes a simple and flexible tool for stakeholder vision analysis, SEVA. The SEVA tool is an open-access tool and is generalized to be used for stakeholder vision analysis in different contexts.