AHC with a collaboration from ASEAN CIO Association (ACIOA) jointly organized the “Hydroinformatics for Disaster Management Workshop” to boost up the utilization of Hydroinformatics for crisis management.
The overwhelming 90% of global natural disaster is water related! Between 1900 and 2007, water-related disasters about floods, droughts, or storms outnumbered all other types of disasters combined. Water-related disaster causes either direct impacts on damages to buildings, crops, life, and environment, or indirect impacts on economic productivity, investment risk, and human health. Despite having the massive impact in the world, the familiarity, knowledge and not to mention implementation of Hydroinformatics is either unaware or limited due to many reasons such as resources allocation or data consolidations. Hydroinformatics do demand expertise and experience which is constraint to only specific group of people.
According to the three main frameworks of ASEAN Hydroinformatics Data Centre (AHC); knowledge sharing, technology matching, and capacity building, AHC would like to explore the potential possibility of hydroinformatics implementation to support for disaster management in ASEAN for the countries that could be impacted. The role of science, technology, and innovation for disaster risk reduction can be recognized by sharing past experiences from each country, co-monitoring and warning, and region-wide communication pre-during-post disaster.
On 27 August 2021, the “Hydroinformatics for Disaster Management in ASEAN” was jointly organized by AHC and ACIOA to exchange past experiences from each ASEAN country on how to prepare-response-action for the approaching disaster and the roles of hydroinformatics responding to those events. There are 59 participants from 8 ASEAN countries: Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam participated in the workshop.
Sharing the past experiences from ASEAN countries are the key starting point to learn the role of Hydroinformatics in each country for disaster management and region-wide collaboration. There were 6 presentations from Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam.
During the discussion, the participants had a consensus on the importance of sharing and contributing beneficial and sharable hydroinformatics or other common information. Some information has already been shared through other channels e.g. Typhoon Committee. All the participants agreed to create 3 official communication channels: AHC websites, WhatsApp group, and ASEAN Water Hub Facebook Page (the latter was contributed by AHC Myanmar representative), to practice the use of hydroinformatics for co-analysis, co-monitoring, and co-evaluation during this rainy season.
