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Lesson 3: Vulnerability Assessment and Hazard Mitigation

Lesson 3 Overview

Tokyo
Tokyo, Japan: What would happen if another major earthquake struck Japan and caused a blackout that lasted over a month in a city like Tokyo? How could GIS be used to examine vulnerabilities like that for major cities?
Photo: Anthony Robinson

This week, we focus on the first of the four phases of emergency management - vulnerability assessment and hazard mitigation. We will read about risk mapping and vulnerability assessment using GIS. Building on the background knowledge we've gained from previous lessons, each of you will conduct a vulnerability analysis of a university of your choosing. You will also continue making progress on the term project assignment.

Objectives

At the successful completion of Lesson 3, students should be able to:

  • describe the concepts associated with risk mapping and vulnerability assessment facilitated by GIS;
  • conduct your own vulnerability assessment;
  • begin background research on your final project topic;
  • describe and discuss the emerging technology trend of volunteered geographic information.

Questions?

If you have questions now or at any point during this week, please feel free to post them in the Lesson 3 Questions and Comments Discussion in Canvas.

Checklist

Lesson 3 is one week in length. Please refer to the Calendar in Canvas for specific time frames and due dates. To finish this lesson, you must complete the activities listed below. You may find it useful to print this page out first so that you can follow along with the directions.

Steps for Completing Lesson 3

Step Activity Access/Directions
1 Work through Lesson 3. You are in the Lesson 3 online content now. The Overview page is previous to this page, and you are on the Checklist page right now.
2 Complete the Lesson 3 Reading Assignment. You will find the Lesson 3 Reading Assignment on Page 4. Make sure you post at least one comment In Canvas that responds to the prompt given for the first set of readings.
3 Read and respond to the Lesson 3 Emerging Theme. On Page 5, you will find this week's Emerging Theme section. You must participate in discussion as instructed on Page 5.
4 Research material for your Term Project. As suggested on Page 6, you should begin looking for relevant reading material to help you complete your Term Project assignment.
5 Complete the Lesson 3 Writing Assignment. The Lesson 3 Writing Assignment is located on Page 7. You will write a 300-500 word vulnerability assessment and submit this assignment to the dropbox I've created for it in Canvas.

 

Mapping Risk

Understanding the Geography of Vulnerability

Developing a clear picture of an area's vulnerability to hazards and disasters is a non-trivial task. It's hard to predict exactly what could happen in a disaster situation. However, even a rough estimate can be a huge help to emergency managers and decision makers who can use that information to develop plans for allocating resources and managing recovery operations. By collecting socio-economic and environmental data sources in a GIS, we can develop risk maps to highlight the potential impact of disasters on people and infrastructure. Our focus in this course is not on the specific analytical methods for doing vulnerability assessment - instead we will reflect on the critical issues associated with planning an emergency management GIS sytem that includes vulnerability assessment as one of its key functions. Most systems for GIS and emergency management are designed for reaction, not prediction and mitigation.

There are a wide range of relevant questions to consider when conducting a vulnerability assessment, including answers to the following key questions:

  • Who is at risk? How many will be affected?
  • What is the spatial and temporal extent of the vulnerability?
  • What capacity does the population at risk have for coping with the disaster?
  • What is the range of possible scenarios given different conditions (for example, a Category 2 hurricane vs. a Category 5 hurricane)?

RESPOND

I'm sure you can think of other relevant questions - so I'd like you to post at least one you would add to this list as a comment in the Canvas Lesson 3 Reading Discussion.

The map below is part of a nice online mapping tool developed by Maplecroft [1], a risk management consulting firm based in the UK. This map shows vulnerability to climate change based on an index developed by Maplecroft. This particular map is quite generalized - they offer much more detailed within-country maps to their paying clients (hmm... so vulnerability mapping is another way to make money with GIS!).

Global map of climate change vulnerability

If you like, you can register for free trial access to their site (you can check off the boxes to avoid any e-mail updates from them). It's an interesting place to poke around to see how companies develop and package risk assessment geospatial products.

Other firms provide what is known as Address Risk Rating products - in essence, you can look up a specific address and get a report outlining all of the vulnerabilities associated with that location. One of our PSU faculty, Dr. James O'Brien, works for Risk Frontiers in Australia, a firm that works on Address Risk Rating products amongst others. You can check out their work here [2].

The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) also coordinates and conducts a great deal of vulnerability assessment work, particularly in the area of flood mapping. FEMA flood maps are used to help set flood insurance rates, among other things. The mapping tool here [3] shows an overview of ongoing FEMA flood mapping, levee repair, and other flood-related risk assessment and mitigation tasks.

The United Nations engages with other entities to develop risk maps for developing countries where they are likely to be involved in future disaster situations. If you check out this map in greater detail [4], notice who collaborated to develop this map. It includes several NGOs, as well as Munich Re, a major re-insurance player. Interesting, huh?

RESPOND

Add a comment in the Canvas Lesson 3 Reading Discussion describing additional types of information you would include on your own version of a risk map for a country like Indonesia. Consider the primary users of this kind of map as well. What would you want to do in order to make this easier to consume by citizens as opposed to decision makers?

 

Reading Assignment

RESPOND

These articles all describe aspects of geospatial risk and vulnerability in the context of emergency management. What are some categories for each concept, and how do they differ in geographic and/or temporal scales?

Note how Wood et al., calculate social vulnerability. What do you think is good about this method, and what do you think could be improved? How would this model be re-applied in other geographic contexts (perhaps in a developing country, for example).

  1. From GIS for Disaster Management - Read: Chapter 8 "Geographic Information Systems and Disaster Mitigation (pp. 233-250)

    Chapter 8 focuses on assessing and modeling risk and vulnerability using GIS. It includes core concepts associated with evaluating mitigation policies as well as the ways in which people can develop social and environmental variables to model risk and resilience.
  2. From the Web - Read: Wood, N.J., Burton, C.G., and Cutter, S.L., (2010) Community Variations in social vulnerability to Cascadia-related Tsunamis in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Natural Hazards, 52(2), 369-389 [5].

    Abstract: Tsunamis generated by Cascadia subduction zone earthquakes pose significant threats to coastal communities in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Impacts of future tsunamis to individuals and communities will likely vary due to pre-event socioeconomic and demographic differences. In order to assess social vulnerability to Cascadia tsunamis, we adjust a social vulnerability index based on principal component analysis first developed by Cutter et al. (2003) to operate at the census-block level of geography and focus on community-level comparisons along the Oregon coast. The number of residents from blocks in tsunami-prone areas considered to have higher social vulnerability varies considerably among 26 Oregon cities and most are concentrated in four cities and two unincorporated areas. Variations in the number of residents from census blocks considered to have higher social vulnerability in each city do not strongly correlate with the number of residents or city assets in tsunami-prone areas. Methods presented here will help emergency managers to identify community sub-groups that are more susceptible to loss and to develop risk-reduction strategies that are tailored to local conditions.

  3. From the Web - Read: "Unit 3: Threat Analysis" from the the course: IS-235 Emergency Planning (download the pdf with the final exam). [6]

Post your response to the Lesson 3 Reading Discussion Forum in Canvas [7].

Emerging Theme: Volunteered Geographic Data

Volunteered Geographic Information

Spatial data has traditionally been developed by government agencies and businesses who could afford the technical and financial expenditure necessary to digitize spatial information. Recent advances in web mapping and GPS technology make it possible for tech-savvy volunteers to develop their own spatial datasets. This sort of geographic data is frequently called "Volunteered Geographic Information" or VGI for short.

The short video here shows the dramatic VGI response to the 2010 Haiti Earthquake through additions and corrections to OpenStreetMap data for the country. Haiti had previously been a poorly-mapped place, and there was an immediate need in the aftermath of the disaster to develop a much better basemap to help recovery efforts. OpenStreetMap - Project Haiti [8] from ItoWorld [9] on Vimeo [10].

One of the most effective VGI efforts can be found at OpenStreetMap.org [11]. OpenStreetMap has the goal of developing a basemap of roads, place names, and other common spatial features for the world, based entirely on volunteered contributions. The OpenStreetMap project aims to provide a completely free worldwide geospatial dataset without any legal or technical restrictions on its use. Most popular web mapping resources like Google Maps or Bing Maps tightly constrain how their data can be manipulated, published, or displayed. Quite a few folks take it for granted that these maps are free, but, in fact, they are only free because those companies are providing access to them right now for free. You are not allowed to re-use and repurpose those resources or download their data yourself, and if Google decided tomorrow to charge you for access to their maps, you would have no recourse to ensure you kept access for free.

In addition to basemapping efforts like OSM, other forms of VGI appear in resources like WikiMapia [12] - a VGI effort intended to describe every place on earth.

Using VGI in Crisis Management Contexts

Next I'd like you to take a look at Ushahidi (which means "testimony" in Swahili), a web portal originally designed to encourage and re-use VGI for crisis management support in Africa (and now is used around the world). Ushahidi lets users send reports about conditions on the ground via email, phone, and web interfaces. Ushahidi is an excellent example of how VGI can be harnessed for situational awareness in a crisis situation.

You can review out a wide range of examples showing how Ushahidi has been deployed in response to violence, disasters, and other crises by browsing recent deployments here [13]. Notice how users can easily contribute their own observations and locate them on the map. Since its original implementation focused on election violence in Kenya, Ushahidi has become a much more powerful platform, and has been deployed in recent earthquake disasters in Haiti [14] and Japan [15], among many other instances.

Mashups like Ushahidi for sharing basic information are now often complemented by other forms of VGI, including privately-owned drones, as shown here in this example from the Humanitarian UAV Network [16].

Further Reading

If you would like to read more, I recommend you check out an excellent position paper [17] by Michael Goodchild [18] which provides a nice summary of VGI and its implications for GIS.

Deliverables for this week's emerging theme

  • Post a comment that describes how you think the emergence of new sources of VGI impacts GIS systems for Emergency Management. Are there future sources of VGI we should be planning for? Are current methods for providing VGI sustainable over the long term? How do you ensure that there will always be volunteers?
  • Then I'd like you to offer additional insight, critique, a counter-example, or something else constructive in response to one of your colleagues' posts.
  • Brownie points for linking to other technology demos, pictures, blog posts, etc., that you've found to enrich your posts so that we may all benefit.

Note: Post your response in the Lesson 3 Emerging Themes Discussion Forum in Canvas [7].

 

Term Project - Find Information

Term Project - Find Information

This week, I will be evaluating the abstracts you developed for your project in last week's lesson. While I do that, I encourage you to spend some time looking for relevant background information that will help you develop your project.

To get started, you could look for:

  • background and context information for the topic you have chosen (who has worked in this area before, and what did they accomplish?);
  • examples you can use to justify your choice of methods (if the project you chose involves proposing a methodology);
  • application examples of the use of GIS in emergency management.

Each project will have quite specific needs, so you will need to think of the additional information you will need to write your report.

Some Suggestions...

I encourage you to make use of our excellent Penn State library resources [19].

Also, Google Scholar [20] is your friend. This is one of the primary ways academics now search for articles.

Finally, a good place to start is to have a look at the recent proceedings from the ISCRAM conference [21]. Tons of good stuff there.

NOTE:

There is nothing to submit this week with this part of the Term Project. But you really should get cracking on your background research. Don't let this time slide by without making some progress on that effort.

If you have questions about how to proceed - you can ask those in the Lesson 4 Questions and Comments Discussion in Canvas. It's great if you're able to help a classmate, too, so don't be shy.

 

Writing Assignment

The emergency management community has significantly increased the educational resources available to practitioners. Go to the main website for the FEMA training program [22] if you haven't seen it yet.

On the FEMA training program website, click on ISP Course List from the menu on the top right. The course list is quite extensive and they have been updating it significantly in recent years. This will be a good resource for you if you remain actively involved in the emergency management domain. There is also information in here that will help you when you write your term project for this course.

If you've already completed the Reading Assignment, you've read about Hazard Analysis from the Emergency Planning independent study program. If you haven't read it yet - you'll need to do so in order to complete this assignment - you can find the assignment on page 4 [23].

This FEMA lesson identifies 5 steps in the Hazard Analysis Process.

  • Identify Hazards
  • Profile each Hazard
  • Develop a Community Profile
  • Determine Vulnerability
  • Create and Apply Scenarios

Lesson 3 Writing Assignment Description

For this lesson, your assignment is to apply the hazard analysis process to a university of your choice. Assume you have been hired by the university to conduct a risk assessment to help the university determine whether or not they should invest resources in emergency response GIS. The university does not have a good idea of what ANY of the vulnerabilities are, so you are starting from a blank slate. Your task is to demonstrate whether or not there is a need for the university to provide funds for a more complete project. If the administration determines there is a need there, you will be asked to submit a formal proposal. Therefore, the information you compile should be suitable for persons without familiarity with emergency management practices, GIS, geodatabases, or vulnerability analysis.

  1. First, briefly identify plausible hazards to the University you've chosen.
  2. Next, select one of the hazards and complete the Activity: Profiling a Hazard. Since many of you have experience with natural disasters, this is an opportunity to choose a human disaster or terrorism event.
  3. Continue through the activity and write a short scenario for the hazard that you have profiled.

The list of hazards could grow enormous if you included every single critical infrastructure element of the university. Therefore, keep it general. The scenario that you develop should be one that describes the risk and the associated problems if the event occurred, highlighting the vulnerabilities at the university. You should be able to summarize the information from steps 1-4 into the final story, or scenario. The final scenario should be 300 - 500 words in length. If you write 2000 words I will be reduced to tears, so be kind to your professor. This assignment is worth 15 points toward the writing assignment portion of your course grade.

Lesson 3 Writing Assignment Submission Instructions

Save your files in the following format:

L3_assign3_firstinitialLastName.doc (or .jpg or .pdf or .tiff).

For example, my file would be named "L3_assign3_arobinson.doc" - This naming convention is important, as it will help me make sure I match each submission up with the right student.

Submit your assignment to the Lesson 3 Writing Assignment dropbox in Canvas. See our Canvas Course Calendar for specific due dates.

Lesson 3 Writing Assignment Grading Criteria

For this assignment, I will assign grades with the following rubric. For each of the three main criteria, I will assign points on a scale from 1-5, with 5 being excellent and 1 being very poor. I define "Impact" as the strength and logic of the arguments and analytical insights you provide with your writing. I define "Content" as the level of understanding and knowledge of relevant topics you demonstrate with your writing. I define "Clarity" as the readability and organization of your writing (including formatting and appropriate graphic design where applicable).

Impact, Content, Clarity: 5 = Excellent, 4 = Very Good, 3 = Satisfactory, 2 = Poor, 1 = Very Poor

Summary

In this lesson, we have learned about the first stage of emergency management - vulnerability assessment. We focused attention on how GIS can be used to conduct risk mapping analyses to identify places where populations and critical infrastructure are vulnerable to disasters.

An effective vulnerability assessment requires answers to the following questions (among others, of course):

  • Who is at risk? How many people will be affected?
  • What is the spatial and temporal extent of the vulnerability?
  • What capacity does the population at risk have for coping with the disaster?
  • What is the range of possible victim scenarios given different conditions?

When planning a GIS system for emergency management, one must consider the analytical tools and data sources necessary to answer these questions. Often, decision makers need information on potential human and financial losses to make their case for resources to mitigate against disasters.

In the next lesson, we will shift focus toward situations in which a disaster is imminent and GIS is called upon to help prepare for potential impacts. Even in the best case scenarios, there is often very little warning (and sometimes no warning at all) prior to a disaster, so there is a serious need for efficient and effective GIS systems to evacuate citizens and stage response resources.

Tell us about it!

If there is anything in the lesson materials that you would like to comment on or add to, feel free to post your thoughts in the Lesson 3 Questions and Comments Discussion in Canvas.  For example, what did you have the most trouble with in this lesson? Was there anything useful here that you'd like to try in your own work?

 

 


Source URL: https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog588/l3.html

Links
[1] https://maplecroft.com
[2] https://www.riskfrontiers.com/arr.htm
[3] http://riskmapprogress.msc.fema.gov/
[4] http://www.preventionweb.net/files/3794_ochaidnhazardv4110606.pdf
[5] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog588/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog588/files/image/Wood_etal_2010.pdf
[6] http://training.fema.gov/EMIWeb/IS/IS235B/IS235B.pdf
[7] http://psu.instructure.com
[8] https://vimeo.com/9182869
[9] https://vimeo.com/itoworld
[10] https://vimeo.com
[11] http://www.openstreetmap.org
[12] http://wikimapia.org
[13] https://www.ushahidi.com/blog
[14] https://www.ushahidi.com/blog/2012/01/12/haiti-and-the-power-of-crowdsourcing
[15] https://www.ushahidi.com/blog/2011/03/16/crisis-mapping-japans-earthquake-and-how-you-can-help
[16] http://map.uaviators.org/uaviators/
[17] http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/docs/position/Goodchild_VGI2007.pdf
[18] http://www.geog.ucsb.edu/~good/
[19] http://www.libraries.psu.edu/psul/home.html
[20] http://scholar.google.com
[21] http://www.iscramlive.org/portal/all-proceedings
[22] http://training.fema.gov/IS
[23] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog588/l3_p4.html