Abstract

During the preparedness and response phase in regularly recurring natural disasters, the responding and professional communities have to decide which actions to take in order to support affected communities. We investigated the information needs of and the disaster management data available to both national and local decision-makers during the floods that affected the riverine islands of the Sirajganj district in Bangladesh in 2014. We conducted 13 semi-structured interviews and three focus group discussions, collecting in this way input from 51 people, transcribed and coded them so that clusters of information needs emerged. Subsequently, we mapped the information needs on the available data sets and identified the needs that are not well covered, of which the need for timely and location-based information is the most important. We recommend executing identification and mapping of available data sources on the information requirements as part of the preparedness phase. Data preparedness can solve to some extent the issue of data not being available timely enough in the initial response phase. Our future research aims at further closing these information gaps by linking and integrating disparate data sets to cover more information needs and by equipping disaster management volunteers at community level with a mobile data collection app to collect data before, during, and after the floods.

Highlights

  • The poor face different levels of impact when exposed to natural hazards than the nonpoor (Hallegatte et al 2016)

  • We compared our framework of information needs with the one from Gralla et al (2015)

  • The Gralla et al framework emerged from consultation with mostly responders from the international humanitarian community, whereas our framework emerged from consultation with only national and local responders

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Summary

18.1 Introduction

The poor face different levels of impact when exposed to natural hazards than the nonpoor (Hallegatte et al 2016). The poor often get their income through the informal economy, and their land and resource rights are usually not registered This lack of data affects the actions of different actors in the preparedness and response phase. The responding professionals are part of the professional community in the field of disaster management, such as national and local governments, NGOs, and national crisis coordination centers All these three groups have to decide based on the data and information available to them—in the period just before the disaster hits—which. Harmonizing and coordinating the different assessments organizations are doing is a difficult task and heterogeneity issues in the data sets that come out of the assessments are most commonly unavoidable Given these data-related challenges, it is evident that responders face information gaps. These gaps will be more articulate in developing countries—often data poor and low tech—than in developed countries

18.2 Research Questions and Methodology
18 Bridging the Information Gap
18.3 Results
18.4 Discussion and Conclusions
Findings
18.5 Future Research
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