A resource for those preparing for and responding to natural disasters, humanitarian crises, and major healthcare emergencies

Abstract

This article describes the dissemination and knowledge transfer activities of Evidence Aid, which was established after the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 to provide a single source of evidence that would help people make wellinformed decisions when preparing for and responding to disasters. Evidence Aid has a dedicated website (www.EvidenceAid.org) to provide access to more than 160 systematic reviews and several other documents relevant to people working on disaster risk reduction, planning, response, recovery, rehabilitation, and resilience. It combines this with a social media presence and Special Collections that bundle together related Cochrane Reviews (www.TheCochraneLibrary.com). The aim is to make it easier for users who need this evidence and don't have time to browse through multiple documents and distill them before making their decisions. Evidence Aid will continue to identify and share resources and knowledge with those who most need it at the time that they need it most. It is working with several partners to identify relevant Cochrane and non-Cochrane systematic reviews and is engaging with users who, by sharing their information and their knowledge needs, will allow Evidence Aid to target its efforts to these priority areas.

Volunteered Geographic Information in Natural Hazard Analysis: A Systematic Literature Review of Current Approaches with a Focus on Preparedness and Mitigation

“…This local monitoring makes it possible to gather huge amounts of information worldwide and can be used to raise risk awareness, e.g., in web platform visualizations [45]. Moreover, such methods can be used in order to educate and train people, as well as to spread knowledge [42]. Additionally, the community members are actively involved by providing their own local information and conducting measurements for planning and capacity building.…”

“…Within the selected studies, there are also combinations of data sources, e.g., for crowdsourcing, social media and additional information from the web are used [39,44]. Further, web platforms are combined with social media [40,42] or mobile phone applications with additional information from the web [35]. The following sections deal with the characteristics of the data sources and their specific application by the users, as well as the consequences for the integration into hazard analysis.…”

“…The participatory science form of engagement is the most present one [18,35,[40][41][42][43]45]. Mobile phone networks are rapidly expanding, and this trend allows the use of such methods even in remote areas.…”

“…First is a general analysis of natural hazards, which leads to the development of methods, strategies or platforms in order to address different hazard types [40,42,44]. Second, there is the possibility to present specific use cases and scenarios where certain hazard types are addressed: apart from volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, storms and mass movements, all other natural hazards that were applied as keywords for the SLR are represented.…”

“…The remaining studies apply platforms that collect and provide their data on a global level [42,45].…”