MOBILISE. Building resilient communities.

The problem

Natural disasters are occurring more frequently in South Asia, particularly Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Malaysia.

Floods, earthquakes, landslides and droughts can wipe out many years of development progress in a single catastrophic event.

Research evidence found that rather than following response and recovery steps after a disaster, there was an urgent need to refocus efforts on building resilience into these areas and to create a more proactive and risk aware approach.

Achieving this required new partnership models between government agencies, enabling them to be fully prepared and capable of responding quickly at the critical early stages of a new event.

Taking a collaborative risk assessment approach demanded the development of a new digital platform to allow the various stakeholders to plan and respond together.

The platform needed to be able to map social, infrastructure, economic and natural vulnerabilities for a defined hazard or set of hazards. It also needed to model the cascading impact of such an event on networked critical infrastructure, the community and the economy.

Our solution

Developed as part of the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the MOBILISE platform gathers information from the Earth Observation group and social media platforms.

It presents this data in an innovative 3D virtual collaborative environment helping the multiple agencies involved to capture a highly accurate picture of a disaster incident and manage their response accordingly.

Going forward they can use the platform to establish an understanding of vulnerabilities, explore future ‘what-if’ scenarios and recommend mitigation measures to improve the areas resilience.