Disaster data are one of the variables that inform ESUPS recommendations on stock pre-positioning strategies in a country.
The disaster profile of a country has an important impact when it comes to identifying the most and least urgent relief items that should be available in order to be prepared before a disaster strikes. It also provides further insight on where it is best to store or move the most-needed items, once humanitarian actors are aware of what others are storing. Is a country prone to floods or droughts, and in which areas these disasters have been happening with more frequency over the last 40 years? This information, coupled with the existing pre-positioned stock and other relevant variables, is what leads to the elaboration of ESUPS recommendations. These are available via STOCKHOLM platform, currently for 15 countries that share their pre-positioned stock data, with more countries in the pipeline. The platform also has a section providing an overall “disaster profile” for countries where the disaster data analysis has been completed.
But how do we get to the above visualisation of a country’s disaster profile?
To trigger ESUPS analyses in a country, one of the first steps is to collect data on disasters that hit the country in the past 40 years: what type of disasters occurred, which locations were impacted and how many people were affected. This data can be retrieved from the EM-DAT database, run by Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). The database is compiled from various sources, including UN agencies, non-governmental organisations, insurance companies, research institutes and press agencies.
After retrieving the data, it is still necessary to perform partly automated and partly manual cleaning, formatting and cross-checks on the dataset. Once this is done, data can be fed into the mathematical model behind STOCKHOLM platform, complemented by other relevant variables such as travel time and distances between locations.
The data cleaning process is rather time consuming, but results in a file listing the core information about disasters in the countries where ESUPS is active, wherever this is available. While ESUPS prepares and compiles such information for its analyses as outlined above, the same disaster data can be used for a variety of purposes by individuals or organisations who might not have access to STOCKHOLM. Navigate to the countries below to find the related disaster data files:
- Madagascar
- Haiti
- Honduras
- Pacific: Cook Island, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Tokelau, Tuvalu
Disaster data for more countries in Africa, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America and Caribbean will be available soon, as ESUPS Team progresses with its data collection and analysis process. Keep checking our LinkedIn updates and Country pages!
If you find the disaster data provided helpful, or if you have any questions about it, do not hesitate to get in touch with ESUPS Team.