The 2018 Understanding Risk Forum kicked off this week in Mexico City. The bi-annual event brings together scientists, engineers, remote sensing experts, software developers, social scientists, and representatives of government, civil society, and development agencies to discuss emerging approaches for making sense of disaster and climate risk. The Forum is convened by the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery and over the years has been an important source of inspiration and collaboration for our team. Robert and Karen are there this week, come say hi if you see us around!

On Tuesday morning, we led a Simulation of the Post-Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) as part of a training by GFDRR’s Resilient Recovery team on post disaster recovery planning. 20 participants worked together in groups attempting to complete an assessment of damages, losses, and recovery needs in the housing sector following an earthquake on a fictional island in the Atlantic. The simulation forced participants to deal with the very real world problems of limited time and information in post-disaster settings, and helped them to understand some of the politics of disaster information. As one of the participants stated, “unless you put a dollar value on these things, there will be no means to support recovery.” The guidelines that inform post disaster assessments, and the ways in which they are put into practice, thus play a central role in shaping disaster recovery processes.  

The simulation was the first large-scale pilot of an activity developed by the Co-Risk Labs team, with the support of GFDRR, and we hope to find opportunities to develop it further with other groups in the future. Some of the game materials are attached to the bottom of this post.

We’re looking forward to participating in the rest of the event. Some of the other highlights are shaping up to be:

• Satellites, machine learning and community intelligence: Flood risk data on the fly on Thursday at 10:45am
• A performance by the Climate Music Project on Thursday at 5:30pm
• A session on the Risk Information Value Chain, organized by Mary Markhvida from the Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative. Robert will present on his work with GFDRR on open data, community participation, and civic technologies for risk assessment.