Technology Enhanced Adaptive Governance for Building Resilient Cities

Seminar abstract

There is significant evidence of the growth of natural disasters on a global level.  

The Asia-Pacific region continues to be the world’s most disaster-prone region; it has many low-/middle-income countries (LMICs), accounting for 47% of the world’s 344 disasters in 2015 with reported economic damage in the region of US$ 5.1 Billion and 16,046 fatalities.  

In this context, the most disaster-prone sub- region is South Asia, recording 52 disasters and 14,647 deaths which represent 64% of the global fatalities in 2015.

Typical natural disasters in this region are floods, earthquakes, landslides and droughts which have the potential to wipe away hard earned development gains achieved over many years as a result of a single catastrophic disaster. 

Therefore, building resilience to natural disasters within low-/middle-income countries (LMICs) should be considered as an important factor in sustainable development.  

Scientific research has shown that disaster risks do not only exist because of the presence of a physical hazard; they are compounded by the presence of vulnerability.  Therefore, there is an urgent need to shift our focus from pure emergency response and recovery towards a sustainable disaster mitigation framework that focuses on building resilience within a disaster-prone area, involving government agencies and the local community, to reduce the impact of a hazard. 

Within this context, the focus of disaster management needs to change as follows from hazard to vulnerability reduction; from reactive to proactive; from single agency to partnerships; from response management to risk management. However, these changes require new partnership models, an emphasis on the early stages of the disaster management cycle (preparedness, response at early critical stages) and novel technological solutions that can promote collaborative risk assessment involving a range of stakeholders.     

This presentation will present the outcome of the GCRF funded MOBILISE project which has been conducting research to influence such a change in Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Malaysia.

This talk will cover the following points:

• Case for using a digital technology platform as a boundary object for building collaborative governance 
• The characteristics of the MOBILISE digital platform that has been developed to support multi-agency collaboration in disaster risk reduction  
• The challenges faced in bringing digital innovation to transform “silo” based working cultures to collaborative working cultures.

Booking

This seminar is free to attend with no need to register in advance.

We warmly invite you to join with your friends, colleagues and classmates.

Join this seminar online on Thursday 25th March at 1pm

Speaker bio

 Professor Terrence Fernando is the Director of the THINKlab at the University of Salford.

Professor Fernando is specialised in distributed visualisation and simulation systems for team collaboration and has a broad background in conducting multi-disciplinary research programmes involving a large number of research teams in areas such as disaster management, distributed virtual engineering, virtual building construction, driving simulations, space exploration, virtual prototyping, urban simulation, and maintenance simulation.