Risk reduction has come increasingly to the fore as humanitarian and development organisations seek to avoid the devastating impacts of the Indian Ocean Tsunami and other recent disasters and as the disaster management agenda has advanced internationally with the development of the Hyogo Framework for Action and recent efforts towards harmonisation in development activities to promote concerted multi-stakeholder investment in effective, durable, and sustainable reduction of vulnerability.

The significant outpouring of support from individual donors and donor agencies alike in response to the Indian Ocean Tsunami have spurred a call for greater accountability in how external assistance is being utilized. Coupled with an interest to help national governments develop better tools for monitoring and guide recovery and reconstruction activities, initiatives like the Tsunami Recovery Impact Assessment and Monitoring System (TRIAMS) are being developed to track progress in recovery against a set of uniform indicators (in the TRIAMS case using existing national survey processes as much as possible), to allow reliable comparison over time and across affected locations. A uniform set of indicators broadly applied against the larger recovery process also promises a potential to evaluate the summary impacts of the many different recovery projects and activities that are underway as a complement to the process and output oriented evaluations that are typically conducted for individual programme interventions.

The tracking of progress toward effective risk reduction should be a key part of these initiatives as well, although it has proven difficult to identify a core set of risk reduction indicators. Efforts to develop or identify risk reduction indicators are often hampered by the same semantic and definitional challenges that face the risk reduction community in general. When we can little agree on the meaning of vulnerability, resilience, risk reduction, and other key concepts, picking indicators to measure these aspects has typically proven difficult as well.

Indeed we seem to be particularly challenged to look across the range of individual and social contexts to understand the needs and demands, resources, decisions, and actions that are all reflected in the risk realities of a particular community.

Key topics

[Need to add discussion of key topics with regard to indicators.]

Related projects

ProVention

In developing a draft set of risk reduction indicators and background notes as guidance for the TRIAMS initiative, ProVention has drawn on a set of key contributors to flesh out what might be perhaps viewed along several axes:

Assets and capital <--> Structures and transformative processes

One axis might be effectively borrowed from the Sustainable Livelihood Framework which seeks to include both assets and capital, on the hand, and structures and transformative processes, on the other hand.

Individual and household <--> Community and broader social/political level

At another level it is also useful to look at resilience and coping at both individual and household level and also at a community and broader social/political level. Recent progress on vulnerability indicators has been promising, but it would be good to complement this with solid progress on indicators for social and political process for risk management within community governance.

Reduced exposure <--> Increased buffering

Here the challenge is to capture aspects of resiliency the reduce exposure to hazards and vulnerability in the first place and those that enhance an individual’s, household’s, community’s capacity to spring back as the foundation for quick and effective recovery.
Tracking a similar interest and related initiative to support the development of a broader situational analysis of needs and vulnerabilities within post-disaster impact assessment, ProVention’s work on indicators is aimed at further establishing core set of potential indicators that look beyond physical damage and loss as the primary lens for understanding needs and vulnerability. While it may be easiest to track physical inputs in reconstruction and recovery – the number of houses, schools, and health facilities rebuilt, the number of kilometers of road reconstructed, etc., ultimately these inputs tells us little about the impacts on broader patterns of vulnerability and resilience. The work of ProVention and core partners within the Community Risk Assessment Network also provide related insights and potential tools for use in both establishing indicators and processes for measuring those indicators. For more information see ProVention's webpage on Risk Reduction Indicators.

Benfield Hazard Research Center & BOND DRR group

The Benfield Hazard Research Center is currently starting a new projecton community level indicators for the Hyogo Framework for Action as a consultancy to the London-based BOND DRR group.