In Indonesia, the law (Law No. 24/2007) states that completing a risk assessment is one of the first steps required to prepare disaster management plans. However, a limited understanding of the risk assessment process and a lack of technical skills can be barriers to completing risk assessments at the sub-national level. BPBD TTU and BPBD Nagekeo both approached DMInnovation to help them with their risk assessments.
Following formal requests, the DMInnovation team travelled to TTU and Nagekeo on a number of occasions to provide technical assistance and support for the risk assessments. Participants gained an understanding of the whole process and were supported through the development of the risk assessment documentation. In November both districts (2-4 November in TTU District and 9-11 November in Nagekeo District) held their risk assessment finalisation workshops with the support of DMInnovation team members.
One component of the technical assistance provided was training and support in the use of spatial data and spatial analyses including the use of InaSAFE to estimate the impact of natural hazards. By using the impact functions in the InaSAFE, workshop participants were able to calculate the exposure for specific hazards such as flood, volcano and earthquake. They also used the generic impact function for other hazards like landslide, drought, fire, strong wind, and pest. Workshop participants work in groups to complete the assessments, allowing them to assess all hazards in a short amount of time. This way, each group had responsibility to complete the entire process for a specific hazard. By the end of the workshop, participants were able to complete the assessment by themselves.
While the InaSAFE impact assessment process does not provide all the information required in the risk assessment, participants were able to combine the assessment with some additional manual processing to complete the risk valuation process required for the risk assessment.
Plans to include land cover exposure data in InaSAFE in the future will increase the relevance of InaSAFE for risk assessment and contingency planning in Indonesia. Overall, the workshop participants found InaSAFE useful in completing the risk assessment process.
