A Flood of Ideas

Background:

The United Nations (UN) Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 outlines seven targets and four priorities for action to prevent new and reduce existing disaster risks. The framework aims to achieve the substantial reduction of disaster risk, losses in lives, and loss of economic, physical, and social assets of people, communities and countries by 2030.

The only way to track tangible progress toward these targets is through monitoring efforts. However, accurate reporting at a national level on the global targets is very challenging. Gaps in data availability and methodologies limit comprehensive reporting around the world. For example, the fourth global target (Target D) of the Sendai Framework is, "Substantially reduce disaster damage to critical infrastructure and disruption of basic services, among them health and educational facilities." Earth observations (EO) hold huge potential to contribute to these monitoring efforts, but a lack of methodologies to take advantage of these data have limited the usefulness of EO in national reporting efforts.

Flooding remains the most impactful natural hazard to human infrastructure around the world. Your challenge is to discover new ways that Earth observations can contribute to the monitoring and reporting of critical infrastructure impacts from flood events across the world. Critical infrastructure in this context includes health and educational facilities, transportation, and communications sectors and similar systems. How can your solution help improve reporting on Target D?

Potential Considerations:

• There will always be spatial and temporal limitations when it comes to leveraging Earth observations for the purpose of disaster damage assessment. However, significant amounts of Earth observation data suitable for these purposes is freely available. What limits usefulness for monitoring capabilities is a lack of scalable analytics solutions that could be implemented to support monitoring efforts around the world.
• Successful responses to this Challenge will directly contribute to a better national-scale understanding of the impacts flood events have on infrastructure, as well as the exposure of national infrastructure to such impacts. Improved understanding of hazards and exposure allows for better decision making by leaders and elected officials, ultimately leading to the saving of lives during future flood events.
• The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction defines disaster risk as the potential loss of life, injury, or destroyed or damaged assets which could occur to a system, society or a community in a specific period of time, determined probabilistically as a function of hazard, exposure, vulnerability and capacity.
• Search keywords: human geography data

For data and resources related to this challenge, refer to the Resources tab at the top of the page.

NASA does not endorse any non-U.S. Government entity and is not responsible for information contained on non-U.S. Government websites.