Our Services
Co-Risk Labs provide expert services in:
- project implementation
- training and capacity building
- participatory design workshop and facilitation
- monitoring and evaluation
- research services to organizations
- hazard, vulnerability and risk modeling and analysis
- post-disaster impact and needs assessment
- citizen-based science and engagement
We’re particularly excited about how our background working at the intersection of public participation, technology, and design can make projects more inclusive and successful.
Our Projects
Understanding Risk Field Lab on Urban Flooding
Our Task: Co-Risk Labs organised a month-long arts and technology un-conference in Chiang Mai, Thailand exploring critical design practices in disaster risk management, collaborative technology production, hacking and art. The event took place between June 2-28, 2019, bringing together over 100 participants from around the world to collaborate and co-produce writings, technologies and art to tackle the challenge of urban flood risk. The event culminated with an arts and science fair, with outputs exposed at a gallery for the month following the event.
Sponsors: The World Bank Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance Program, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), Facebook, the Earth Observatory of Singapore.
Services & Skills: Event facilitation, participatory design workshop, hackathons, collaborative event curation, risk analysis, research and design.
Artathon On Disaster and Climate Risk
Our Task: Organised an immersive 2-day ‘artathon,’ to collaborate on artistic explorations of natural disasters and climate change impacts in the Bay Area. The event brought together 22 accomplished artists and scientists in April 2017. Seven teams worked over the course of two days to put irony, affect, hope, balance, and voice in conversation with scientific representations of natural disaster and climate risk. The results, ranging from finished piece to proposals to works in progress, were displayed at ELL Gallery in May and June of 2017 and will be shown again on Stanford Campus this Fall.
Sponsors: Stanford University Urban Resilience Initiative, Stanford Blume Earthquake Engineering Center, Natural Capital Project, City of San Francisco, ELL-SF art gallery, ArtsUp.
Services & Skills: Event facilitation, participatory design workshop, hackathons, collaborative event curation.
Disaster Risk Modeling
Our Task: We develop probabilistic models of hazard and risk in order to quantify expected losses from disaster, or quantity the potential benefits of resilience investments. These tools can be used by international or government institutions to better understand, insure against, mitigate and prepare for future disasters.
Clients: The World Bank, Stanford University Urban Resilience Initiatives.
Services & Skills: Hazard modelling; Vulnerability modelling; Disaster risk modelling and analysis.
Urban Shelter Lessons Learned from Bagdad (2013)
Compilation of lessons from NRC’s urban programmes in Baghdad using methods including the web of institutionalisation and emphasising: early questions about whether an organisation will really add anything useful; modest ambition; curiosity about the place; and thoughtful questioning.
Clients: Norwegian Refugee Council (https://www.nrc.no/)
Our Task: Compilation of lessons from NRC’s urban programmes in Baghdad using methods including the web of institutionalisation and emphasising: early questions about whether an organisation will really add anything useful; modest ambition; curiosity about the place; and thoughtful questioning. Written by Fiona Kelling and Laura Heykoop, edited by Kate Crawford.
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Key Lessons found: Success resulted from a complicated combination of factors: (i) joining forces with people who knew people, (ii) changing direction when things didn’t work and (iii) good luck and good timing.
Services & Skills: Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning
Post-Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA)
A comprehensive understanding of damages and needs following disaster is critical to properly plan and implement an effective recovery program. CoRisk Labs has extensive experience documenting and reporting the impacts of disaster on the built environment, the estimated value of damages, the needs for recovery, and developing strategies for a more resilient recovery. Built on previous experiences in Haiti (2010), Nepal (2015) and Vanuatu (2015), we work within the international Post-Disaster Needs Assessment framework to support institutions and governments to gain the best available information as quickly as possible to plan for post-disaster recovery.
Clients: The World Bank / Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (https://www.gfdrr.org/post-disaster-needs-assessments)
Services & Skills: Post-Disaster Impact Assessment; Post-Disaster Recovery Planning; Post-Disaster Housing Recovery.
Project Evaluation – Camp Disaster Preparedness in Western Sahara
Our Task: Evaluation of Oxfam Solidarité’s ECHO funded project to address disaster preparedness and mitigation in Sahrawi camps in the context of sheltering processes at settlement and household level. Using shelter decision trees, the field team illustrated choices faced by householders as they sought to change their shelter situation.
Clients: Oxfam Solidarite (https://www.oxfamsol.be/)
Services & Skills: Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning.
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Key Lessons:
- To evaluate the impact of technical interventions and training, the programme and construction design decisions must include analysis of why people build in a particular place and in a particular way; who decides; who builds; who pays; who checks on what is being built; and what aesthetic, cultural or structural standards do they check against.
- Household decision-making follows a different sequence and logic from the shelter programming algorithm in technical guidance.
Open Data for Resilience
Clients: The World Bank / Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (https://www.gfdrr.org/)
Our Task: Our team helped to develop and implement the World Bank’s Open Data for Resilience Initiative, a program that has brought improved risk communication, access to information, and public participation in disaster and climate risk modeling to over 35 countries around the world.
Services & Skills: Design Research; Program management
Understanding Risk Boulder
Clients: City of Boulder
Our Task: We partnered with a team of experts from around Colorado and the United States to organize a two-day event that convenes the talent and expertise of our region’s communities, scientists, technologists, and government to develop shared understanding of the challenges we face in building long-term resilience to natural hazards, the impacts of climate change, and develop innovative solutions to meet them.
Services & Skills: Conference / Workshop Planning; Convening Experts; Event Documentation.
Event Website: https://understandrisk.org/event/understanding-risk-boulder-2015/
Ethical Data Use in Risk Assessment
Clients: UN OCHA & GovLab
Our Task: Co-Risk Labs collaborated with UN OCHA and the GovLab to facilitate a workshop that brought together over 30 experts in risk modelling to discuss ethical challenges and considerations in disaster risk assessment. Discussion topics included informed consent, community participation, data quality, and risk communication.
Services & Skills: Workshop Planning; Ethics in Disaster Risk Management; Simulation Exercises.
Image Credit: GovLab