Climate change is acting all over the world, in different ways, often causing damage to structures, populations and the environment. MEDiate aims to develop a decision support system (DSS) for disaster risk management by considering multiple interacting natural hazards and cascading impacts using a novel resilient-informed, service-oriented and people-centred approach that accounts for forecasted modification in the hazard and exposure.
This risk-informed DSS will be delivered as user-friendly IT system, allowing end users to model and visualise potential disaster scenarios and understand how potential physical and social actions will influence the scenarios and their communities’ resilience to current and future natural hazards.
Project objectives
Improving multi-hazard assessments of natural hazards and highlighting potential trends due to climate change. The project will develop improved modelling of how the natural hazards interact and cascade at various scales and how these hazards will change with time due to the changing climate.
Improving multi-hazard risk assessments accounting for interactions and trends in their components. The project will prioritize the improvements in the modelling of risk to the built environment and people given these interacting and increasing hazards and changes to both exposure and vulnerability/resilieMEDnce.
Advancing beyond the state-of-the art in multi-hazard hazard and risk approaches by developing dynamic and future-centric risk-framing tools that effectively address the decision-making needs of various stakeholders, including local government, businesses and citizens. These tools will be integrated into the computational engine of the MEDiate Decision Support System (DSS), providing sufficient flexibility that will enable different decision makers to tailor the analyses and visualisations in line with their specific priorities.
Providing decision makers with a means of visualising the components of disaster risk and resilience, the stakeholders’ preferences and the effect of different actions and alternate futures on possible scenarios for an area, considering the multiple hazards that are present and how these (and other risk components) may change with time.
Design and Development Process
The research and development activities will use a Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology to guide the co-design, co-development and co-evaluation of the MEDiate DSS. PAR will be implemented as an iterative cyclical process of developing solutions – a journey where group solutions are co-developed (planned), implemented (acted), monitored (observed) and refined (reflection) as part of an iterative change programme.
MEDiate PAR model
The project consortium will form multidisciplinary teams comprising researchers and developers from the technical work packages, from the PAR management work packages, and from the dissemination, ethics project management work packages. Practitioners and stakeholders (collectively the PAR teams) will work together to co-design, co-develop, co-test and refine the MEDiate DSS through three PAR cycles.
