Disaster Informatics: Information Management as a Tool for Effective Disaster Risk Reduction

From risk identification to emergency response and recovery, information plays a vital role and the effective use of information is instrumental to reduce the impact of disasters. With the advancement of information and communication technology in the last few decades, lack of information is no longer a major issue for disaster risk reduction. The major issue, rather, is managing the information, translating it into a comprehensive knowledge for decision making and disseminating it to the communities at risk for action. The advancement of technology and reach of communication tools at a grassroots level have created an opportunity to increase effectiveness of disaster risk management with the optimum use of disaster informatics. This chapter presents an overview of disaster informatics, a conceptual framework for information management for disaster risk reduction, a review of existing approaches of information dissemination through the Internet and a review of the combined potential of Internet with tools which are widely available at grassroots levels.