Opening Remarks: Emergency Management System Reforms 

The New Zealand Government recently announced its response to the recommendations of a Ministerial review into Delivering better responses to natural disasters and other emergencies. The Government’s response to the review sets out a broad, multi-year work programme that will deliver extensive change to New Zealand’s emergency response system. This programme is referred to as the ‘Emergency Management System Reforms’, and involve the following key focus areas:

• Putting the safety and wellbeing of people at the heart of the emergency response system
• Strengthening the national leadership of the emergency management system
• Making it clear who is responsible for what, nationally and regionally
• Building the capability and capacity of the emergency management workforce
• Improving the information and intelligence system that supports decision making in emergencies

David Coetzee’s opening remarks will focus on some of the specific initiatives that are now underway to give effect to specific recommendations, that will likely be of interest to the ISCRAM community. These initiatives involve work towards establishing a ‘Common Operating Picture’, investigations into a new National Emergency Management Facility, the establishment of rapidly deployable ‘Fly-in Teams’, and a review of the Coordinated Incident Management System (CIMS) - New Zealand’s version of the traditional Incident Command System (ICS).

The review report and the full version of the Government’s response to the review can be viewed here.

 

Biography:

David Coetzee is the Manager, Capability & Operations at the Ministry of Civil Defence & Emergency Management. He is responsible for national response preparedness through the development of response capability, processes and systems, the National Crisis Management Centre, as well as managing the national warning system. Currently he also leads a review of the New Zealand Coordinated Incident Management System (CIMS).

David also holds the position of National Controller, making him responsible for leading the national level response to civil defence emergencies in New Zealand. In this capacity he has been at the helm in the National Crisis Management Centre for an extended list of emergencies and exercises; he singles out the Christchurch earthquake of 2011 that resulted in New Zealand’s first ever state of national emergency, and the Kaikoura earthquake of 2016, as the most challenging and demanding responses in his career so far.

In 2018 David received the Minister of Civil Defence’s Gold Award for significant contribution to Civil Defence Emergency Management for leading the establishment of the Emergency Mobile Alert system in New Zealand.

At the international level David serves on the Steering Group of the Pacific Tsunami Warning System under the IOC (UNESCO), who has called upon his experience to assist with tsunami capacity building in several regions. On behalf of the IOC (UNESCO) he also chairs a global working group on tsunami disaster management, public awareness and reduction. He is a past member of the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) team.

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: Setting the scene for exploring the opportunities that arise from disaster

 

Biography:

Lianne Dalziel is serving her second term as Mayor after serving for 23 years in the New Zealand Parliament, the last four terms as the Member of Parliament for Christchurch East. Lianne served as a Cabinet Minister in the fifth Labour Government under the leadership of Prime Minister Rt. Hon. Helen Clark (1999-2008).

During that time Lianne held a number of portfolios, including Immigration, Commerce, Food Safety, Women’s Affairs & Senior Citizens and associate roles in Education and Justice. She chaired the Commerce Select Committee from 2008-2011.

Given the impact of the earthquakes on the Christchurch East electorate, Lianne researched as much information as she could to ensure that she could inform her constituents about what was happening and also to help her understand what lay ahead in terms of recovery.

"Because I wanted to understand how other places had recovered from disasters, over the last couple of years I have read everything I could lay my hands on and attended every conference that was going. Some amazing international speakers have come to Christchurch starting with the locally organized TEDx and the International Speaker Series, which was part of the Share an Idea campaign.

"They opened up my eyes to the possibility of what we can learn from each other and that we here in Christchurch do not have to reinvent the wheel. The offers to help us on our journey have been heartfelt, which shows how much understanding there is between places that have been struck by disaster.

"What I learned early though is that it’s not a paint by numbers exercise and that even with all of the offers of help, the future of Christchurch is one we will create for ourselves."

Lianne was invited to join the UNISDR’s Parliamentary Advisory Group on Disaster Risk Reduction in 2012. With this background, Lianne has become a champion of resilience, with Christchurch selected as one of the first tranche of cities to participate in the 100 Resilient Cities Network pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation.

"Resilience is a journey, not a destination. My aspiration for resilience is based on the belief that governments - central or local - cannot do as well as can properly resourced and supported communities do for themselves in determining their own destiny. It is about being well-informed, adaptive and able to work collaboratively to co-create that future."

Lianne is committed to Christchurch remaining New Zealand's Garden City, but at the same time seizing all the opportunities we now have.

"Christchurch is a city of opportunity - we are open to new ideas, new people and new ways of doing things - a place where anything is possible."

Biography:

Simon Dunstall leads the Decision Sciences program in CSIRO Data61.

Data61's mission is to promote a flourishing national ecosystem of researchers, developers and innovators in digital technologies and data-driven businesses. The Decision Sciences program has 100 staff members and a much larger network of collaborators, and has foci including social media analytics, information systems engineering, natural hazard risk modelling, optimisation, and finance and superannuation research.

Simon is a researcher in analytics and optimisation. His recent work includes the development of infrastructure network planning systems and the development of methods for quantifying and managing the bushfire-related risks posed by powerlines in Australia. In addition to his role at CSIRO, Simon is the current national president of the Australian Society for Operations Research (ASOR).

The Role of Geospatial Data in Residential Recovery

The 2010-2011 Canterbury Earthquake Sequence and the Kaikoura Earthquake in 2016 necessitated EQC to enhance its geospatial capability to respond to operational recovery needs. The scale of the Canterbury earthquakes was beyond that the Earthquake Commission had ever dealt with. EQC moved from a paper-based system to collecting damage data digitally on iPads for over 182,000 properties. The organisation also had to respond by developing interactive maps to monitor and manage claims.

The wealth of new science and geotechnical data in Canterbury, much of which was funded by EQC, contributed to land zoning decisions for recovery and to the establishment of geospatial tools such as the Canterbury Geotechnical Database. EQC’s ongoing funding of GeoNet, New Zealand’s real-time earthquake hazard monitoring system, also provided a wealth of geospatial information in both of these events.

This session focuses on a case study to demonstrate how a core geospatial tool (the Kaikoura Earthquake Viewer) facilitated better deployment of resources, sharing of information, and overall understanding of the recovery environment than had ever been available in the past events. The future opportunities for new geospatial technology and tools to correlate data sets to better understand natural hazard risk are rapidly evolving - for both recovery and risk reduction. To maximise the use of geospatial information we need to facilitate integration across the natural hazard management system and establish effective collaborative governance frameworks for our national data sets.  We also need to know the right questions to ask from our data. These are some of the key challenges EQC’s Resilience Strategy will be addressing over the next 10 years.

 

Biography:

The Resilience team facilitates the placement of EQC’s reinsurance programme with global reinsurers. The team also guides EQC’s investment in research and education about natural hazards, and its application to improved monitoring, assessment and risk reduction.

Dr Hugh Cowan guides EQC’s investment in research and education to improve natural hazard risk assessment and resilience, and supports the placement of EQC’s global reinsurance programme.

His contributions to the Canterbury Recovery Programme have included the facilitation of engineering advice to Government for guidance on repairs to housing, and to improve the performance of liquefaction-prone land.

Dr Cowan previously led the establishment of New Zealand’s geological hazard monitoring system “GeoNet” at GNS Science.

Hugh is a Fellow of the NZ Society for Earthquake Engineering and has led fact-finding missions to earthquake and tsunami disaster zones in Asia and South America. Hugh holds an MSc (First Class Hons) in Engineering Geology and a PhD from the University of Canterbury.

The Sendai Framework – how it is promoting research and development, exchange of knowledge and deployment of information systems for crisis management

The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 has resulted in a shift away from managing crises to proactively reducing their risks. With the recent synchronous adoption of landmark UN agreements the Sendai Framework with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), COP21’s Paris Climate Conference, World Humanitarian Summit and Habitat III have all created a rare but significant opportunity to build coherence across different but overlapping policy areas. Taken together these frameworks make for a more complete agenda as building resilience requires action spanning climate change, development, health, humanitarian and disaster risk reduction areas. This coherence will serve to strengthen existing risk fragility and resilience frameworks for multi hazard assessments, and aim to develop a dynamic, local, preventive, and adaptive urban governance system at the global, national, and local levels. The Sendai Framework has identified four actions with a focus on information systems and knowledge management in much of the agreement. Two are listed below:

• To guide action at the regional level through agreed regional and subregional strategies and mechanisms for cooperation for disaster risk reduction, as appropriate, in the light of the present Framework, in order to foster more efficient planning, create common information systems and exchange good practices and programmes for cooperation and capacity development, in particular to address common and transboundary disaster risks; (paragraph 28a)
• To promote and improve dialogue and cooperation among scientific and technological communities, other relevant stakeholders and policymakers in order to facilitate a science policy interface for effective decision-making in disaster risk management; (paragraph 27 h)

The agreements represent a major turning point in the global efforts to tackle existing and future challenges in all countries. In order to support UN member states to implement these frameworks, the need to promote research and development, exchange of knowledge and deployment of information systems for crisis management is key and examples of such implementation will be shared.

 

Biography:

Professor Virginia Murray qualified in medicine and has extensive experience in health protection by being actively  involved in chemical and extreme event incident preparedness, response and recovery.

Currently she is the Public Health Consultant in Global Disaster Risk Reduction for Public Health England where she has been actively engaged in providing health, science and technology support for the development and implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, one of the three 2015 UN landmark agreements via international networks addressing implementation science in data related activities such as the Data project of the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR) and the disaster risk reduction flagship project for the Committee on Data of the International Council for Science (CODATA).

 

A State of the Art Assessment of Research on Information Systems in Crisis Response and Management

This talk examines new technologies in ICT for crisis and emergency management. I will explore how far we have come in this domain, where we currently are, and what technological and social challenges lay ahead for us. From the early focus on communication technologies in the 1850s we are now poised on the brink of a bright new future. Drones (UAVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), unmanned marine vehicles (UMVs), are becoming our “digital responders”. Advances in augmented reality, wearables, and computer-based simulation are impacting training, search and rescue and policy development, etc. Behind much of this technological explosion lie new advances in artificial intelligence.  Yet somehow the full potential of these technologies are not being realised worldwide; there is a gap between what is currently used “on the ground” and what is fully possible. I will look at the some of the main challenges that are preventing us from realising the full potential of these technologies and suggest possible ways to overcome them.

Biography:

Julie Dugdale is an Associate Professor at University Grenoble Alps, France and leader of the MAGMA Multi-Agent Systems research team, part of the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory (LIG). She is also been an Adjunct Full Professor at the University of Agder, Norway where she worked in the Centre for Integrated Emergency Management (CIEM). She also serves on the IFIP Domain Committee on IT in Disaster Risk Reduction. She was awarded her HDR (habilitation) from University Joseph Fourrier in 2013, concerning « Human behaviour modelling in complex socio-technical systems – an agent based approach ». She obtained her PhD in 1994 from the University of Buckingham, UK. She came to France 1998 from an Associate Professor post at De Montfort University, UK. Before joining the MAGMA team in 2006, she worked for 3 years in the Human-Machine Interaction team at LIG, and for 5 years in a Cognitive Engineering Team at Computer Science Research Institute in Toulouse.

Her work concerns human behaviour modelling and simulation of crisis and emergency situations. She has been involved in the area of emergency and crisis management since 1998 and over the years has published over 100 articles on this topic. She is also an editorial board member of several journals concerning agent technologies, information systems and crisis management, and artificial intelligence. She takes a strong multi-disciplinary approach to her work, merging the social sciences (cognition, geography, sociology) with her primary domain of computer science. This is in addition to working closely with crisis managers and practitioners.

She became involved with the ISCRAM community since its inception in 2004. Since then she has been heavily engaged with the ISCRAM community: Chair/Co-Chair of the ISCRAM Doctoral Colloquium 2007, 2009, 2012; Co-Chair of the Intelligent Systems ISCRAM track 2007, 2008, 2008, 2012, 2013, and other 2 other tracks in 2005, 2006; ISCRAM Program Chair 2011, Lisbon, Portugal; Conference Co-Chair ISCRAM Med 2015, 2016, 2017; In 2010 she was very proud to receive the ISCRAM Distinguished Service Award for outstanding support to the ISCRAM Community. In 2011 she was elected to the ISCRAM Board of Directors, then she became ISCRAM Vice President and finally ISCRAM President; a role which she served until 2017.