Culture and the psychological impacts of natural disasters: Implications for disaster management and disaster mental health

In recent decades, natural disasters have caused extensive losses and damages to human psychological wellbeing, economy, and society. It has been argued that cultural factors such as social values, traditions, and attachment to a location influence communities facing and responding to natural disasters. However, the issue of culture in disaster mental health seems to have received limited attention in policy and practice. This review highlights the importance of cultural background in the assessment of vulnerability to the psychological impacts of disasters, disaster preparedness, and provision of disaster mental health services. In particular, this paper suggests the importance of cultural competence in the planning and delivery of effective disaster mental health services. In order to address the varying circumstances of people with different cultural backgrounds, disaster mental health services must be developed in a culturally sensitive manner. Development of culturally competent disaster mental health services requires significant changes in policy making, administration, and direct service provision

A multi-organisational approach for disaster preparedness and response:the use of optimisation and GIS for facility location, stock pre-positioning, resource allocation and relief distribution

From 1992 to 2012 4.4 billion people were affected by disasters with almost 2 trillion USD in damages and 1.3 million people killed worldwide. The increasing threat of disasters stresses the need to provide solutions for the challenges faced by disaster managers, such as the logistical deployment of resources required to provide relief to victims. The location of emergency facilities, stock prepositioning, evacuation, inventory management, resource allocation, and relief distribution have been identified to directly impact the relief provided to victims during the disaster. Managing appropriately these factors is critical to reduce suffering. Disaster management commonly attracts several organisations working alongside each other and sharing resources to cope with the emergency. Coordinating these agencies is a complex task but there is little research considering multiple organisations, and none actually optimising the number of actors required to avoid shortages and convergence. The aim of the this research is to develop a system for disaster management based on a combination of optimisation techniques and geographical information systems (GIS) to aid multi-organisational decision-making. An integrated decision system was created comprising a cartographic model implemented in GIS to discard floodable facilities, combined with two models focused on optimising the decisions regarding location of emergency facilities, stock prepositioning, the allocation of resources and relief distribution, along with the number of actors required to perform these activities. Three in-depth case studies in Mexico were studied gathering information from different organisations. The cartographic model proved to reduce the risk to select unsuitable facilities. The preparedness and response models showed the capacity to optimise the decisions and the number of organisations required for logistical activities, pointing towards an excess of actors involved in all cases. The system as a whole demonstrated its capacity to provide integrated support for disaster preparedness and response, along with the existence of room for improvement for Mexican organisations in flood management.

Goal-based modeling of dynamically adaptive system requirements

Self-adaptation is emerging as an increasingly important capability for many applications, particularly those deployed in dynamically changing environments, such as ecosystem monitoring and disaster management. One key challenge posed by Dynamically Adaptive Systems (DASs) is the need to handle changes to the requirements and corresponding behavior of a DAS in response to varying environmental conditions. Berry et al. previously identified four levels of RE that should be performed for a DAS. In this paper, we propose the Levels of RE for Modeling that reify the original levels to describe RE modeling work done by DAS developers. Specifically, we identify four types of developers: the system developer, the adaptation scenario developer, the adaptation infrastructure developer, and the DAS research community. Each level corresponds to the work of a different type of developer to construct goal model(s) specifying their requirements. We then leverage the Levels of RE for Modeling to propose two complementary processes for performing RE for a DAS. We describe our experiences with applying this approach to GridStix, an adaptive flood warning system, deployed to monitor the River Ribble in Yorkshire, England.

Logistical framework for last mile relief distribution in humanitarian supply chains:considerations from the field

Recent years large scale natural disasters: (e.g. 2004 Tsunami, 2005 Earthquake in South Asia, 2010 Earthquake in Haiti, 2010 flood in Pakistan, 2011 Earthquake in Japan etc.) have captured international attention and led to the advance of research of disaster management. To cope with these huge impact disasters, the involved stakeholders have to learn how quickly and efficiently the relief organisations are able to respond. After a disaster strikes, it is necessary to get the relief aid to the affected people by the prompt action of relief organisations. This supply chain process has to be very fast and efficient. The purpose of this paper is to define the last mile relief distribution in humanitarian supply chain and develop a logistical framework by identifying the factors that affect this process. Seventeen interviews were conducted with field officers and the data analysed to identify which are the critical factors for last mile relief distribution of disaster relief operation. A framework is presented classifying these factors according to the ability to implement them in an optimisation model of humanitarian logistics.

The impact of coordination on the effectiveness of last mile relief distribution

Last mile relief distribution is the final stage of humanitarian logistics. It refers to the supply of relief items from local distribution centers to the disaster affected people (Balcik et al., 2008). In the last mile relief distribution literature, researchers have focused on the use of optimisation techniques for determining the exact optimal solution (Liberatore et al., 2014), but there is a need to include behavioural factors with those optimisation techniques in order to obtain better predictive results. This paper will explain how improving the coordination factor increases the effectiveness of the last mile relief distribution process. There are two stages of methodology used to achieve the goal: Interviews: The authors conducted interviews with the Indian Government and with South Asian NGOs to identify the critical factors for final relief distribution. After thematic and content analysis of the interviews and the reports, the authors found some behavioural factors which affect the final relief distribution. Model building: Last mile relief distribution in India follows a specific framework described in the Indian Government disaster management handbook. We modelled this framework using agent based simulation and investigated the impact of coordination on effectiveness. We define effectiveness as the speed and accuracy with which aid is delivered to affected people. We tested through simulation modelling whether coordination improves effectiveness.

Preface

The Semantic Web has come a long way since its inception in 2001, especially in terms of technical development and research progress. However, adoption by non- technical practitioners is still an ongoing process, and in some areas this process is just now starting. Emergency response is an area where reliability and timeliness of information and technologies is of essence. Therefore it is quite natural that more widespread adoption in this area has not been seen until now, when Semantic Web technologies are mature enough to support the high requirements of the application area. Nevertheless, to leverage the full potential of Semantic Web research results for this application area, there is need for an arena where practitioners and researchers can meet and exchange ideas and results. Our intention is for this workshop, and hopefully coming workshops in the same series, to be such an arena for discussion. The Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC - formerly the European Semantic Web conference) is one of the major research conferences in the Semantic Web field, whereas this is a suitable location for this workshop in order to discuss the application of Semantic Web technology to our specific area of applications. Hence, we chose to arrange our first SMILE workshop at ESWC 2013. However, this workshop does not focus solely on semantic technologies for emergency response, but rather Semantic Web technologies in combination with technologies and principles for what is sometimes called the "social web". Social media has already been used successfully in many cases, as a tool for supporting emergency response. The aim of this workshop is therefore to take this to the next level and answer questions like: "how can we make sense of, and furthermore make use of, all the data that is produced by different kinds of social media platforms in an emergency situation?" For the first edition of this workshop the chairs collected the following main topics of interest: • Semantic Annotation for understanding the content and context of social media streams. • Integration of Social Media with Linked Data. • Interactive Interfaces and visual analytics methodologies for managing multiple large-scale, dynamic, evolving datasets. • Stream reasoning and event detection. • Social Data Mining. • Collaborative tools and services for Citizens, Organisations, Communities. • Privacy, ethics, trustworthiness and legal issues in the Social Semantic Web. • Use case analysis, with specific interest for use cases that involve the application of Social Media and Linked Data methodologies in real-life scenarios. All of these, applied in the context of: • Crisis and Disaster Management • Emergency Response • Security and Citizen Journalism The workshop received 6 high-quality paper submissions and based on a thorough review process, thanks to our program committee, the decision was made to accept four of these papers for the workshop (67% acceptance rate). These four papers can be found later in this proceedings volume. Three out of four of these papers particularly discuss the integration and analysis of social media data, using Semantic Web technologies, e.g. for detecting complex events in social media streams, for visualizing and analysing sentiments with respect to certain topics in social media, or for detecting small-scale incidents entirely through the use of social media information. Finally, the fourth paper presents an architecture for using Semantic Web technologies in resource management during a disaster. Additionally, the workshop featured an invited keynote speech by Dr. Tomi Kauppinen from Aalto university. Dr. Kauppinen shared experiences from his work on applying Semantic Web technologies to application fields such as geoinformatics and scientific research, i.e. so-called Linked Science, but also recent ideas and applications in the emergency response field. His input was also highly valuable for the roadmapping discussion, which was held at the end of the workshop. A separate summary of the roadmapping session can be found at the end of these proceedings. Finally, we would like to thank our invited speaker Dr. Tomi Kauppinen, all our program committee members, as well as the workshop chair of ESWC2013, Johanna Völker (University of Mannheim), for helping us to make this first SMILE workshop a highly interesting and successful event!

GIS and optimisation:potential benefits for emergency facility location in humanitarian logistics

Floods are one of the most dangerous and common disasters worldwide, and these disasters are closely linked to the geography of the affected area. As a result, several papers in the academic field of humanitarian logistics have incorporated the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for disaster management. However, most of the contributions in the literature are using these systems for network analysis and display, with just a few papers exploiting the capabilities of GIS to improve planning and preparedness. To show the capabilities of GIS for disaster management, this paper uses raster GIS to analyse potential flooding scenarios and provide input to an optimisation model. The combination is applied to two real-world floods in Mexico to evaluate the value of incorporating GIS for disaster planning. The results provide evidence that including GIS analysis for a decision-making tool in disaster management can improve the outcome of disaster operations by reducing the number of facilities used at risk of flooding. Empirical results imply the importance of the integration of advanced remote sensing images and GIS for future systems in humanitarian logistics.

Scenario-based preparedness plan for floods

The increasing trend of disaster victims globally is posing a complex challenge for disaster management authorities. Moreover, to accomplish successful transition between preparedness and response, it is important to consider the different features inherent to each type of disaster. Floods are portrayed as one of the most frequent and harmful disasters, hence introducing the necessity to develop a tool for disaster preparedness to perform efficient and effective flood management. The purpose of the article is to introduce a method to simultaneously define the proper location of shelters and distribution centers, along with the allocation of prepositioned goods and distribution decisions required to satisfy flood victims. The tool combines the use of a raster geographical information system (GIS) and an optimization model. The GIS determines the flood hazard of the city areas aiming to assess the flood situation and to discard floodable facilities. Then, the multi-commodity multimodal optimization model is solved to obtain the Pareto frontier of two criteria: distance and cost. The methodology was applied to a case study in the flood of Villahermosa, Mexico, in 2007, and the results were compared to an optimized scenario of the guidelines followed by Mexican authorities, concluding that the value of the performance measures was improved using the developed method. Furthermore, the results exhibited the possibility to provide adequate care for people affected with less facilities than the current approach and the advantages of considering more than one distribution center for relief prepositioning.

Designing post-disaster supply chains:learning from housing reconstruction projects

Post-disaster housing reconstruction projects face several challenges. Resources and material supplies are often scarce; several and different types of organizations are involved, while projects must be completed as quickly as possible to foster recovery. Within this context, the chapter aims to increase the understanding of relief supply chain design in reconstruction. In addition, the chapter is introducing a community based and beneficiary perspective to relief supply chains by evaluating the implications of local components for supply chain design in reconstruction. This is achieved through the means of secondary data analysis based on the evaluation reports of two major housing reconstruction projects that took place in Europe the last decade. A comparative analysis of the organizational designs of these projects highlights the ways in which users can be involved. The performance of reconstruction supply chains seems to depend to a large extent on the way beneficiaries are integrated in supply chain design impacting positively on the effectiveness of reconstruction supply chains.

Crisis communication and social media : the changing environment for natural disaster response

Over the past two years there have been several large-scale disasters (Haitian earthquake, Australian floods, UK riots, and the Japanese earthquake) that have seen wide use of social media for disaster response, often in innovative ways. This paper provides an analysis of the ways in which social media has been used in public-to-public communication and public-to-government organisation communication. It discusses four ways in which disaster response has been changed by social media: 1. Social media appears to be displacing the traditional media as a means of communication with the public during a crisis. In particular social media influences the way traditional media communication is received and distributed. 2. We propose that user-generated content may provide a new source of information for emergency management agencies during a disaster, but there is uncertainty with regards to the reliability and usefulness of this information. 3. There are also indications that social media provides a means for the public to self-organise in ways that were not previously possible. However, the type and usefulness of self-organisation sometimes works against efforts to mitigate the outcome of the disaster. 4. Social media seems to influence information flow during a disaster. In the past most information flowed in a single direction from government organisation to public, but social media negates this model. The public can diffuse information with ease, but also expect interaction with Government Organisations rather than a simple one-way information flow. These changes have implications for the way government organisations communicate with the public during a disaster. The predominant model for explaining this form of communication, the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC), was developed in 2005 before social media achieved widespread popularity. We will present a modified form of the CERC model that integrates social media into the disaster communication cycle, and addresses the ways in which social media has changed communication between the public and government organisations during disasters.

Crisis communication and social media:the changing environment for natural disaster response

Over the past two years there have been several large-scale disasters (Haitian earthquake, Australian floods, UK riots, and the Japanese earthquake) that have seen wide use of social media for disaster response, often in innovative ways. This paper provides an analysis of the ways in which social media has been used in public-to-public communication and public-to-government organisation communication. It discusses four ways in which disaster response has been changed by social media: 1. Social media appears to be displacing the traditional media as a means of communication with the public during a crisis. In particular social media influences the way traditional media communication is received and distributed. 2. We propose that user-generated content may provide a new source of information for emergency management agencies during a disaster, but there is uncertainty with regards to the reliability and usefulness of this information. 3. There are also indications that social media provides a means for the public to self-organise in ways that were not previously possible. However, the type and usefulness of self-organisation sometimes works against efforts to mitigate the outcome of the disaster. 4. Social media seems to influence information flow during a disaster. In the past most information flowed in a single direction from government organisation to public, but social media negates this model. The public can diffuse information with ease, but also expect interaction with Government Organisations rather than a simple one-way information flow. These changes have implications for the way government organisations communicate with the public during a disaster. The predominant model for explaining this form of communication, the Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC), was developed in 2005 before social media achieved widespread popularity. We will present a modified form of the CERC model that integrates social media into the disaster communication cycle, and addresses the ways in which social media has changed communication between the public and government organisations during disasters.

Tsunami disaster recovery experience:a case study on micro, small and medium scale enterprises in Southern Sri Lanka

Post-disaster recovery of Micro, Small and Medium-Scale Enterprises (SMEs) remains an issue of interest for policy and practice given the wide scale occurrences of natural disasters around the globe and their significant impacts on local economies and SMEs. Asian Tsunami of December 2004 affected many SMEs in southern Sri Lanka. The study was developed to identify the main issues encountered by the Tsunami affected SMEs in Southern Sri Lanka in the process of their post-tsunami recovery. The study: a) identifies tsunami damage and loss in micro and SMEs in the Galle district; b) ascertains the type of benefits received from various parties by the affected micro and SMEs; c) evaluates the problems and difficulties faced by the beneficiary organizations in the benefit distribution process; and d) recommends strategies and policies for the tsunami-affected micro and SMEs for them to become self-sustaining within a reasonable time frame. Fifty randomly selected tsunami-affected micro and SMEs were surveyed for this study. Interviews were conducted in person with the business owners in order to identify the damages, recovery, rehabilitation, re-establishment and difficulties faced in the benefit distribution process. The analysis identifies that the benefits were given the wrong priorities and that they were not sufficient for the recovery process. In addition, the many governance-related problems that arose while distributing benefits are discussed. Overall, the business recovery rate was approximately 65%, and approximately 88% of business organizations were sole proprietorships. Therefore, the policies of the tsunami relief agencies should adequately address the needs of sole proprietorship business requirements. Consideration should also be given to strengthen the capacity and skills of the entrepreneurs by improving operational, technological, management and marketing skills and capabilities.

Disaster risk reduction infrastructure requirements for South-Western Bangladesh:perspectives of local communities

Purpose: Development of effective disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies for communities at risk of being affected by natural disasters is considered essential, especially in the wake of devastating disaster events reported worldwide. As part of a wider research study investigating community perspectives on existing and potential strategies for enhancing resilience to natural disasters, community perspectives on infrastructure and structural protection requirements were investigated. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach: Patuakhali region in South-Western Bangladesh is a region significantly at risk of multiple natural hazards. In order to engage local communities and obtain their perspectives, focus group discussions were held with local community leaders and policy makers of at-risk communities in Patuakhali region, South-Western Bangladesh. Findings: Infrastructure and structural protection requirements highlighted included multi-purpose cyclone shelters, permanent embankments and improved transport infrastructure. Much of the discussions of focus group interviews were focused on cyclone shelters and embankments, suggesting their critical importance in reducing disaster risk and also dependence of coastal communities on those two measures. Originality/value: The research design adopted sought to answer the research questions raised and also to inform local policy makers on community perspectives. Local policy makers involved in DRR initiatives in the region were informed of community perspectives and requirements, thus contributing to community engagement in implementing DRR activities.