GDA AID Disaster Resilience

Promoted by the European Space Agency (ESA) and led by Indra, the Global Development Assistance (GDA) AID Disaster Resilience program is dedicated to strengthening disaster resilience, through the use of Earth observation tools, and focuses on mapping all components of the risk equation.

How does the project work?

Disaster resilience is the ability of individuals, communities and organizations to adapt and recover from hazards, stress and shocks, learning from past disasters and reducing their exposure and vulnerability to future ones. Started in 2023, GDA AID Disaster Resilience aims to demonstrate that Earth observation can help improve the resilience of communities by providing crucial data in the prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery phases of disaster management.
The project develops around three main themes:

  1. Exposure and vulnerability mapping, including for example classification of building types, land use and estimation of the value of exposed assets
  2. Mapping of risks, in particular flooding, coastal erosion and extreme weather
    conditions
  3. Risk assessment, with the production of a series of maps and statistics that describe and quantify the impact of floods, subsidence and landslides on people and assets, combining exposure and vulnerability maps with hazard maps

The project is based on a close collaboration between the partners, experts in risk and earth observations, and various International Financial Institutions (IFIs), in particular World Bank (WB) and Asian Development Bank (ADB). The project in fact translates into the development and application of services tailored to the needs of some global programs of both WB and ADB which intend to improve the conditions of resilience to disasters of natural origin at different scales.
With each initiative we focused on a specific case study for the evaluation and study of the possibilities provided by Earth observation tools for risk management.

What are the expected results?

  • Adapt vulnerability, hazard and risk exposure mapping services to support IFI initiatives
  • Apply these services to real cases to demonstrate their effectiveness and applicability
  • Improve the technical capabilities of individual initiatives so that they can use the developed services independently

What does CIMA Research Foundation do?

As part of the program, CIMA Research Foundation is involved in six case studies:

  • Improved EO-based analytics to provide disaster risk metrics at national level in Azerbaijan, for the development of Country Climate Development Reports (CCDR), in support of the Global Program for Disaster Risk Analytics (GDPRA) of World Bank, which led us to provide advanced flood risk analysis at country scale in Azerbaijan.
  • Support to design and suitability of Natural Based Solutions using flood hazard and green infrastructure mapping. The case study contributes to the Global Program on Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) for Climate Resilience, also carried out by the World Bank, and aimed to support the development of NBS based on flood risk mapping and green infrastructure, that is, a network of natural and semi-natural areas developed to provide ecosystem services and at the same time increase biodiversity. The use case was carried out in Thailand and Argentina. CIMA Research Foundation contributed to the analysis of areas susceptible to floods and to the evaluation of the effectiveness of NBS in reducing flood risk.
  • Enhanced flood and exposure mapping to enable better financial risk management in Morocco, in support of the World Bank’s Disaster Risk Financing and Insurance (DRFI) Program, which aims to strengthen disaster resilience with financial instruments such as catastrophe insurance. Here CIMA, in collaboration with LIST and WASDI, reconstructed past urban flooding events for the calibration of insurance models.
  • Subsidence and flood diagnosis in Indonesian cities, in support of the Asian Development Bank Flood Management in North Java project. CIMA Research Foundation contributed to the assessment of flooding risks in combination with subsidence phenomena in Indonesian cities in collaboration with Planetek Italia.
  • Geospatial indicators of land stability, and flood susceptibility to improve water management in Bangladesh, to strengthen the management of water resources and the assessment of risks such as landslides, floods. The use case contributed to the Asian Development Bank’s projectEnhancing Differentiated Approaches in Context-Sensitive Situations.