Zero cost solutions of geo-informatics acquisition, collection and production for natural disaster risk assessment

Abstract

The global and local impacts of climate change and natural disasters cause great casualties and economic losses each year. Catastrophic events bring more damage to urban areas than rural places because of the high density of human population, property and the infrastructures. Geo-informatics is critical for all stages of disaster management including disaster prevention, preparedness, emergency decision making, disaster relief, rebuilding and recovery. It is critical for risk assessment of natural disasters. Since all hazard risk components are location-specific and vary spatially, accurate risk assessment relies on geo-informatics. Geo-informatics as the basis of decision-making information has proved to be critical and essential to natural, technological and manmade disaster risk assessments. Commercial sources of geo-informatics are usually expensive, especially for those developing countries and regions where living standards are low but natural disasters occur more frequently and cause large losses. The expense of geo-informatics acquisition, collection and production varies vastly with different update frequency, imagery quality, and the total amount of information carried. In contrast with commercial sources, free sources of geo-data and geo-software have limited comparable features. However, they have the flexibility to add new features by further development. Based on a current study of urban natural disaster risk assessment and vulnerability mapping which aims at improving community safety and resilience to natural hazards, this paper shares our experience on zero cost solutions of geo-informatics acquisition, collection, and semi-automatic production procedures by using free internet resources of Google Maps, Google Earth, and free and/or open source software including QGIS (Quantum GIS), GRASS, SAGA, Monteverdi, Sextante GIS and Orfeo Toolbox. In order to enrich attributes to meet the requirements of risk assessment, methods of combining the acquired geo-informatics with other formats of geo-data (e.g., Digital Elevation Model, raster layers, vector layers, and Microsoft Excel files) are introduced. The purpose of this paper is to share our experience on zero-cost geo-informatics acquisition, collection and production solutions with urban planning managers, emergency managers, risk researchers and people with similar concerns. The geo-informatics developed from this research forms a basis for disaster vulnerability measurement which is an important part for urban disaster risk assessment.