European earth observation tools for effective disaster preparedness and response
Recent natural disasters such as the Indian Ocean tsunami and the South Asia earthquake highlighted the fact that effective disaster preparedness and response measures are a matter of life and death for the victims. As a major donor and coordinator of EU civil protection and humanitarian assistance, the European Commission needs to be capable of taking effective emergency decisions within hours of a disaster, both at the financial level and in the field in support of humanitarian relief and reconstruction operations. The Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) facilitates these decisions by deploying state of the art earth observation tools to gather relevant information in a timely manner. By mobilising high-resolution satellite and information technologies, its experts are able to swiftly provide relief services on the ground with up-to-date disaster maps, indicating the presence of viable transport routes and damaged zones for the benefit of emergency rescue, humanitarian relief and reconstruction operations. Immediately following the recent South Asia earthquake of 8 October, the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS) sent out an alert to emergency services by SMS and email within 30 minutes. Developed by the JRC in cooperation with DG ECHO (humanitarian aid) and the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), the use of GDACS triggered an immediate response, with 3.6 million euro of emergency aid being quickly released. In conjunction with the RESPOND partnership, the JRC also began to produce very high-resolution maps and impact assessments to support the work of the Commission services, the EU's civil protection mechanism, and European and international aid agencies. These helped to identify navigable roads and avoid areas blocked by landslides, so that help could arrive as fast as possible to devastated areas. Furthermore, rapid analysis of pre and post-disaster images allowed the JRC to identify the most damaged areas, especially in remote and inaccessible areas, and estimate the likely size of the population affected, allowing relief workers to direct their efforts towards areas with the highest number of survivors in most need of humanitarian relief. They quickly estimated that up to three million people had been affected within a 90 kilometre radius of the earthquake's major epicentre. These maps and assessments are now accessible electronically through the JRC's websites, and are being distributed to the NGO community in order to contribute to the planning of future reconstruction programmes. The major remaining challenge is to produce accurate and useful information that can support the very early phases of search and rescue operations during future humanitarian disasters. The challenge is already being taken up by the space industry, which is planning optical and radar-based missions to provide more frequent cloud-free post-disaster satellite data of very high spatial resolution.