We conceived of the Global Crisis Data Bank in 2021, after having diagnosed what would be needed in order for IFRC to achieve some of the ambitious goals stated in our 10 year strategy and 5-year plan of work. These included things like scaling up funding for anticipatory action and timely targeted disaster responses and helping Red Cross/Red Crescent National Societies progress toward greater digital maturity.
A lot has changed in the three years since then. Ambitions have grown even more. In 2022 alone,
- In 2022, IFRC launched a Global Climate Resilience Platform with an aim of spending CHF 1 Billion to help 500 million people adapt to climate change and become more resilient to its negative impacts.
- The UN Secretary General launched an Early Warnings for All, which aims to mobilise US$ 3 Billion to ensure that climate- and weather-related early warning systems reach everyone on the planet by 2027 with accurate, life-saving information.
What does this mean? In short, scaling up ambitions and funding require scaling up systems as well. Otherwise, how to justify, through transparent evidence and analysis, those massive sums of money and where and on what to allocate it? The challenge we set out to face in 2021 remains, in fact it’s only got bigger, with more riding on our work.
Our solution
IFRC has rebuilt the GO platform, transforming it into an end-to-end system that National Societies can use to access funding for anticipatory action and disaster response and to learn from past operations.
With seed funding from USAID and UNDRR, we’ve collaborated with dozens of partners from the UN, Government, academia, civil society, the private sector and national Red Cross/Red Crescent societies to build the world’s largest database of open data on natural hazards and their impacts. We’re working with experts from around the world to align our hazard and impact taxonomies with international standards and we’re adopting — and promoting — standards like the Risk Data Library Standard and the Humanitarian Exchange Language to make this data transparent, accessible and interoperable.
We’ve named the database the Montandon, after our colleague who worked on a predecessor in the 1920s and 1930s, and now ready to make this data available via GO and the Montandon’s API.
Analysing the data
We also started seriously analysing that data to identify key gaps, biases, trends and learnings and applying it to climate policy at UNFCCC COP28. Based on our own analysis of the gaps and biases in the Montandon data, we’ll produce guidance and peer-reviewed journal articles for researchers who would like to use the Montandon for their own analyses of disaster risk trends and how existing risks may be affected in the coming decades by climate change.
We’re also working with data science students from the University College London (UCL) to find ways to make working with the Montandon data more intuitive. This will make it easier for people to answer questions like:
- Which countries have the highest amount of risk for any given hazard, and where within countries are most high-risk areas?
- Which hazards have historically accounted for the most humanitarian impacts — such as the number of people affected, displaced or killed — or economic losses?
- And what are the impacts associated with certain return periods, which is needed for both forecast-based financing and disaster risk management?
We’re also planning to do several analyses of the data ourselves to support IFRC’s programming, policy and advocacy work. For example, we’ve begun using the Montandon’s impact data attributed to floods and storms to help our colleagues from the Disaster Response Emergency Fund (DREF) team decide how to allocate funding among the regions at different times of the year — this is key given that IFRC is scaling up DREF funding for anticipatory action and needs to ensure liquidity of the fund so that we can respond when calamitous events occur. And for our colleagues working on urban resilience, we’re planning to analyse climate- and weather-related risk trends for urban areas and assess changes in risk for these locations under different climate change and developmental scenarios.
Adding value up and down the chain
For the benefit of all users of GO, we are currently integrating data from the Montandon into country, regional and global pages. Even more exciting, we’re using our analysis of the data to “prepopulate” some information to make it easier and faster for National Societies to apply for funding from the DREF.
At the regional and country level, we’ve organised workshops to support National Societies and relevant government ministries. At these events, participants learn what data we are capturing in the Montandon, how it relates and builds upon existing efforts and — most importantly — how they can use the data to inform their anticipatory action and disaster responses.
Participants start by mapping their national disaster data “ecosystem” and learning how the Montandon complements and enhances existing efforts within each country. This is a crucial step because each individual disaster database is incomplete: they have gaps related to temporal coverage, spatial coverage and phenomena included. By bringing together all of the available information from each of the different sources, we can better understand these gaps and biases and begin addressing them following the workshops.
Thus, we and the Nepali Red Cross Society are working with Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA) to share data back and forth between the Montandon and the NDRRMA’s BIPAD portal; and in Indonesia we and the Indonesian Red Cross Society (PMI) are linking the Montandon to the government’s disaster-loss database, the DIBI.
In 2024, we’ll scale up this engagement by offering two more in-person workshops in Sri Lanka and Argentina, as well as online webinars, to continue training National Society and fellow IFRC colleagues as well as partners how to analyse the Montandon data themselves.
How to access the data and get involved
As mentioned above, a lot of the Montandon data will be seamlessly integrated into what people see on GO. But for those who want to access it directly, we’ve documented the API and are drafting instructions on how to access it. We’re currently developing more detailed guidance to support specific use cases, which will be published on the GO Wiki.
For colleagues working on humanitarian action, human development, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, who would like an interactive demo and introduction to the Montandon, please sign up for a Montandon webinar or get in touch with us directly.
