IRMA

Disaster risk reduction policies and institutional mechanism exist at various degrees of completeness in the African countries part of the consortium. Their effectiveness is however limited when having to deal with major disasters and complex emergencies. Risk management is often limited to specific hazard monitoring with limited or no consideration of the vulnerability of the area at risk neither to the systemic nature and possible domino effect between risks of different nature. It is the vulnerability of the population and of the infrastructure at risk that may transform a hazard into a major disaster.

The purpose of the project is to build a reference platform suitable for the management of natural and environmental risks in Africa. The platform must allow the stakeholders in risks management to develop and use tailored risk management models; therefore, the platform will provide similar facilities as WIN, ORCHESTRA, SSE, SANY and u-2010 solutions and should make it easy to build a multi-risks management, i.e. the platform will exploit the commonalities of the information sources and take into account the interdependencies between different hazards. The platform will feature two major technical components:

• an environment for providing services of all kinds related to the acquisition, processing, dissemination of information and an efficient storage of all relevant information so that the stakeholders can analyse afterwards the sequence of events and adapt operational procedures consequently, and
• a multi-purpose solution for the communications (sensor networks, remote sensed data transfer, service access, alert, emergency communications) based on IPv6 either to federate legacy communications or to provide native IPv6 solutionsThe project intends to deliver a pre-operational open platform, assessed by end-users through operational scenarios serving as reference for future larger scale deployment and providing the facilities for prototyping risk management systems and for supporting a rapid development of applications services. This platform will be populated with specific applications (Bushfire, Flood, Desertification and urban risks.

The project started June 2008, for further information please have a look at the project web here.