Celebrating 10 Years of Training in GIS for Disaster Risk Management
05 November 2014, Bangkok, Thailand - UNOSAT and ADPC, the Asian Preparedness Disaster Centre have successfully delivered the “10th International Training on GIS for Disaster Risk Management (GIS4DRM)”. The course took place in Bangkok from 3 to 14 November 2014. This training is designed to respond to the needs of the South East Asian Countries in the area of disaster management and the use of geospatial information technology for multi-hazard risk assessment. 2014 marks a decade in the successful delivery of the “International Training GIS for Disaster Risk Management” course editions.
The GIS4DRM courses were initiated in 2004 by ADPC, the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), and the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation of the University of Twente (ITC). In 2011 the curriculum of the course was redesigned jointly by ADPC, AIT, ITC, and UNOSAT. The new course included aspects of post-disaster needs assessment and particularly GIS/RS methodologies for impact analysis and damage assessment. Since 2011 UNOSAT is in charge of delivering the module on Post-Disaster Impact and Damage Analysis.
The course underlines that technological advancement can be used for better disaster risk reduction and shows how spatial data is useful in all phases of the emergency management cycle, including for early warning, hazard, vulnerability and risk assessment, and in general to devise better disaster reduction measures. The course provides concepts and methodologies to perform satellite based rapid response mapping and damage assessment including understanding of the benefits and limitations of using geo-spatial information technology in a disaster situation.
Geospatial technology is a mature support for practical disaster risk reduction and UNOSAT together with the European Space Agency and several UN partners including the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs is advocating for a strong message in this sense at the World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in March 2015.
The 10th GIS4DRM course was attended by 15 professionals from various South East Asian countries and international humanitarian organizations.
Photo: Course participants during a training session in Bangkok