Proposal of the Construction of

Comprehensive Information System for Natural Disaster Mitigation(Draft)

Abstract

On our planet, all kinds of natural hazards have assaulted mankind again and again in every age. It is shown that to some extent, human history is a process of mankind's struggle against natural disasters. According to the statistics from 1950 to 1999 (Murchener Ruck Munich Re Group, 1999), all kinds of sudden natural disasters (excluding drought) have resulted in a death toll of up to 1,400,000 and economic losses up to $ 960 billion USD. Actually, in order to take countermeasures to the natural disaster effect, the most important thing is to set up the comprehensive information system for natural disaster mitigation.

Due to various political and economic factors, the information about natural disaster situation and its aftereffects usually fall into confidential information or incompletely exoteric information in a lot of the countries. Therefore, it is desirable to set up a new organization that aims at serving for natural disaster scientific researches, within which the natural disaster information, socio-economic losses caused by disaster, and varied scientific research data and achievements on disaster can be shared as fully as possible. In order to realize the global sharing of natural disaster information resources and the scientific research achievements, it is necessary to develop an efficient and integrated system of global comprehensive information for natural disaster to provide the scientists engaged in the work of natural disaster prevention and mitigation with a platform for exchange and cooperation. In addition, on account of the extraordinarily severe situation of natural disaster in developing countries or regions, it is especially of significance to establish the natural disaster comprehensive information system in one or two developing countries. Through this, we should get the precious experience in setup and application of the natural disaster comprehensive information system in advance, and then move forward to spread these scientific achievements worldwide so as to secure human life and property.

The Comprehensive Information System on Natural Disaster Mitigation (CISDM) is a joint research project which is multi-disciplinary and universal. Through this joint project, the mechanism and platform of scientific research on natural disaster can be developed, and standards of the natural disaster information resource can also be studied and formulated to guide the establishment of natural disaster database and to exploit the comprehensive information system gateway for natural disaster mitigation on the basis of natural disaster database. Every participating country can ground on this system to carry on the basic scientific research on natural disaster, informatics comprehensive analysis and natural disaster alarming and predicting system. This project adopts open cooperative model, into which every country, area and individual can voluntarily participate.

In order to assure the implementation and development of this project, an international expert group, an international working group and several local working groups will be set up. The CISDM Task group will work on the major natural hazards and disaster mitigation, establishment of natural disaster database including historic database and the real-time database, and will strive to set up the integrative scientific and technological model system for disaster preparedness and disaster mitigation in one or two developing counties or regions. The Task group encourages and facilitates worldwide knowledge sharing and co-operating in natural disaster mitigation of scientific and technical data. The Task Group will organize meetings on science and technology of disaster mitigation, disaster management, standardization and quality control of the disaster database. The CISDM task group will organize the meeting on disaster data sharing, data exchanging and data application by keeping up with the S&T development in the whole world. By these meetings, new cooperation among countries, regions and international organizations on Natural Disaster Mitigation will be promoted. Furthermore, CISDM task group will provide new proposals to the CODATA to set up new task groups or work groups.

Key words: Natural disaster; Disaster alarming; Disaster Mitigation; database; Information System