GIS-based Software Applications for Environmental Risk Management
A GIS software application for environmental risk assessment of such properties/ portfolio could serve as a powerful risk management tool for the real estate as well as the insurance sector. The framework of such an application would comprise of three main parts:
 Figure 3: A sample hazard map showing the impact of a contamination scenario in a region due to the release of hazardous material from a certain height Use of GIS software application for this kind of application provides many benefits: 1) Visual display of the hazard, risk, and expected damage values; 2) Use of spatial modeling techniques to carry out the analysis using the GIS data layers as input; 3) Faster and efficient handling of huge and complex dataset. Depending upon the nature of environmental risk insurance policy, some other complexities many also be integrated in the system. For example, it may be important to assess the health risks, by measuring the chances that the people living in certain properties would experience health problems. Exposure to toxic air pollutants can cause serious health risks, and if this were covered in the insurance policy, the ERM system would need to include the data, analysis and output engines related to the health risk factors too. A catastrophic modeling application for the emergency preparedness and response planning by a city administrator The natural catastrophes, for example, earthquakes, cyclones, landslides, floods, forest fires, can potentially cause environmental changes in a significant and sudden manner.  Figure 4: A typical disaster management cycle GIS software applications are extensively used for emergency preparedness and response planning by city administrators in such cases. In a typical disaster management cycle (as indicated in figure 4), disaster prevention, disaster mitigation, and disaster preparedness constitute the pre-disaster planning phase, and response, recovery and mitigation as the post-disaster planning phase. Pre-disaster steps are more useful since they help in preparing for the disasters in advance, however, proper post-disaster planning is equally important to cope up with the immediate impact of a disaster, as and when it occurs. It involves responding to disasters by the city administrators and various organizations, providing many services that need to be mobilized at a moment's notice and functioning for an indeterminate period in a coordinated manner under stressful and difficult circumstances. These may be demobilized after the emergency is over. The ability of a city administrator to manage the emergencies in a proactive manner, rather than just react to the crises, is critically dependent on the availability and flow of real time and archived information from monitoring systems, thematic databases, and decision support systems that are linked to each other. Use of GIS would be a necessity in these cases, in view of the spatial nature of the input as well as output data, and the software-based analysis engines would provide the abilities for fast and accurate analysis of the possible scenarios. Hence, a robust GIS software ERM application can be very effectively used for this purpose. It would comprise of a set of smaller sub-systems for 1) displaying the past hazard and loss data, 2) displaying the human, property and ecological exposure data, 3) storing the emergency management related departments’ locations, contact details and capacity, 4) linkages with real time, online systems for tracking and communication of the hazard and damage spread; and 5) models for risk analysis and resource mobilization based on the available data; etc. Having a “rules engine” would be an important part of this system, wherein a set of recommended thresholds and recommendations would be stored, enabling the automatic triggering of certain basic actions in the event of a catastrophe, while the advance actions or escalations would remain at the discretion of the city administrator. Conclusion A framework for developing GIS software applications for environmental risk management was described in this paper, along with three specific examples of its usage by different type of users. The advantages of using GIS software based ERM applications are immense, and these applications are increasingly being used by a wide variety of users. With the availability of a good range of GIS software technology options, for desktop, Intranet or Internet environments, it is becoming increasingly possible to develop such ERM systems in an efficient and timely manner. Use of component based architecture allows modeling of a complex system with multiple and scalable components. However, besides the usage of appropriate architecture and spatial modeling technology, the use of expert opinion remains a very important factor in the success of such knowledge-based systems. Within such a comprehensive GIS software based ERM system, the results obtained from spatial and analytical modeling tools for environmental risk assessment can be used in different ways – for example, for comparative (or relative) risk analysis, cost-benefit analysis, scenario analysis, probabilistic analysis, decision matrix, sensitivity analysis etc. In conclusion, due to the need for displaying and analyzing a huge volume of the spatial as well as non-spatial environmental hazards and exposure data in a fast and accurate way, and also due to the progressive increase in the g-Readiness of the users, GIS based software applications would continue to serve as powerful tools for effective environmental risk assessment and management.
Page 3 of 3
| Previous | |