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Increasing National Resilience through an Open Disaster Data Initiative

06.08.23 | 9 min read | Text by Shefali Juneja Lakhina & Melanie Gall & Monica Sanders

Summary

Federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial agencies collect and maintain a range of disaster resilience, vulnerability, and loss data. However, this valuable data lives on different platforms and in various formats across agency silos. Inconsistent data collection and lack of validation can result in gaps and inefficiencies and make it difficult to implement appropriate mitigation, preparedness, response, recovery, and adaptation measures for natural hazards, including wildfires, smoke, drought, extreme heat, flooding, and debris flow. Lack of complete data down to the granular level also makes it challenging to gauge the true cost of disasters.

The Biden-Harris Administration should launch an Open Disaster Data Initiative to mandate the development and implementation of national standards for disaster resilience, vulnerability, and loss data to enable federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial agencies to regularly collect, validate, share, and report on disaster data in consistent and interoperable formats.

Challenge and Opportunity

Disaster resilience, vulnerability, and loss data are used in many life-saving missions, including early detection and local response coordination, disaster risk assessments, local and state hazard mitigation plans, facilitating insurance and payouts, enabling rebuilding and recovery, and empowering diverse communities to adapt to climate impacts in inclusive, equitable, and just ways. 

While a plethora of tools are being developed to enable better analytics and visualizations of disaster and climate data, including wildfire data, the quality and completeness of the data itself remains problematic, including in the recently released National Risk Index

This is because there is a lack of agency mandates, funding, capacity, and infrastructure for data collection, validation, sharing, and reporting in consistent and interoperable formats. Currently, only a few federal agencies have the mandate and funds from Congress to collect disaster data relevant to their mission. Further, this data does not necessarily integrate state and local data for non-federally declared disasters. 

Due to this lack of national disaster and climate data standards, federal and state agencies, universities, nonprofits, and insurers currently maintain disaster-related data in silos, making it difficult to link in productive and efficient ways down to the granular level. 

Also, only a few local, state, and federal agencies regularly budget for or track spending on disaster resilience, vulnerability, and response activities. As a result, local agencies, nonprofits, and households, particularly in underserved communities, often lack access to critical lifesaving data. Further, disaster loss data is often private and proprietary, leading to inequality in data access and usability. This leaves already disadvantaged communities unprepared and with only a limited understanding of the financial burden of disaster costs carried by taxpayers. 

Since the 1990s, several bipartisan reviewsresearchdata, and policy documents, including the recent President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) report on modernizing wildland firefighting, have reiterated the need to develop national standards for the consistent collection and reporting of disaster vulnerability, damage, and loss data. Some efforts are under way to address the standardization and data gaps—such as the all-hazards dataset that created an open database by refining the Incident Command System data sets (ICS-209). 

However, significant work remains to integrate secondary and cascading disasters and monitor longitudinal climate impacts, especially on disadvantaged communities. For example, the National Interagency Fire Center consolidates major wildfire events but does not currently track secondary or cascading impacts, including smoke (see AirNow’s Fire and Smoke Map), nor does it monitor societal vulnerabilities and impacts such as on public health, displacement, poverty, and insurance. There are no standardized methods for accounting and tracking damaged or lost structures. For example, damage and loss data on structures, fatalities, community assets, and public infrastructure is not publicly available in a consolidated format

The Open Disaster Data Initiative will enable longitudinal monitoring of pre- and post-event data for multiple hazards, resulting in a better understanding of cascading climate impacts. Guided by the Open Government Initiative (2016), the Fifth National Action Plan (2022), and in the context of the Year of Open Science (2023), the Open Disaster Data Initiative will lead to greater accountability in how federal, state, and local governments prioritize funding, especially to underserved and marginalized communities. 

Finally, the Open Disaster Data Initiative will build on the Justice40 Initiative and be guided by the recommendations of the PCAST Report on Enhancing prediction and protecting communities. The Open Disaster Data Initiative should also reiterate the Government Accountability Office’s 2022 recommendation to Congress to designate a federal entity to develop and update climate information and to create a National Climate Information System

Precedents 

Recent disaster and wildfire research data platforms and standards provide some precedence and show how investing in data standards and interoperability can enable inclusive, equitable, and just disaster preparedness, response, and recovery outcomes.

The Open Disaster Data Initiative must build on lessons learned from past initiatives, including:

There are also important lessons to learn from international efforts  such as the United Nations’ ongoing work on monitoring implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015–2030) by creating the next generation of disaster loss and damage databases, and the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Disaster Pilot 2023 and Climate Resilience Pilot, which seek to use standards to enable open and interoperable sharing of critical geospatial data across missions and scales. 

Plan of Action

President Biden should launch an Open Disaster Data Initiative by implementing the following four actions.

Recommendation 1. Issue an Executive Order to direct the development and adoption of national standards for disaster resilience, vulnerability, and loss data collection, validation, sharing, and reporting, by all relevant federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial agencies to create the enabling conditions for adoption by universities, non-profits, and the private sector. The scope of this Executive Order should include data on local disasters that do not call for a Presidential Disaster Declaration and federal assistance.

Recommendation 2. Direct the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to issue an Open Disaster Data Initiative Directive for all relevant federal agencies to collaboratively implement the following actions:

Recommendation 3. Designate a lead coordinator for the Open Disaster Data Initiative within the Office of Science Technology and Policy (OSTP), such as the Tech Team, to work with the OMB on developing a road map for implementing the Open Disaster Data Initiative, including developing the appropriate capacities across all of government.

Recommendation 4. Direct FEMA to direct appropriate funding and capacities for coordination with the National Weather Service (NWS), the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Risk Management Agency, and the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) to maintain a federated, open, integrated, and interoperable disaster data system that can seamlessly roll up local data, including research, nonprofit, and private, including insurance data. 

In addition, Congress should take the following three actions to ensure success of the Open Disaster Data Initiative:

Recommendation 5. Request the Government Accountability Office to undertake a Disaster Data Systems and Infrastructure Review to:

Recommendation 6. Appropriate dedicated funding for the implementation of the Open Disaster Data Initiative to allow federal agencies, states, nonprofits, and the private sector to access regular trainings and develop the necessary infrastructure and capacities to adopt national disaster data standards and collect, validate, and share relevant data. This access to training should facilitate seamless roll-up of disaster vulnerability and loss data to the federal level, thereby enabling accurate monitoring and accounting of community resilience in inclusive and equitable ways.

Recommendation 7. Use the congressional tool of technical corrections to support and enhance the Initiative:

Conclusion

The Open Disaster Data Initiative can help augment whole-of-nation disaster resilience in at least three ways: 

  1. Enable enhanced data sharing and information coordination among federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial agencies, as well as with universities, nonprofits, philanthropies, and the private sector.
  2. Allow for longitudinal monitoring of compounding and cascading disaster impacts on community well-being and ecosystem health, including a better understanding of how disasters impact poverty rates, housing trends, local economic development, and displacement and migration trends, particularly among disadvantaged communities.
  3. Inform the prioritization of policy and program investments for inclusive, equitable, and just disaster risk reduction outcomes, especially in socially and historically marginalized communities, including rural communities.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are some of the gaps and weaknesses of current national disaster databases in the United States?

Recent analysis by a federal interagency effort, Science for Disaster Reduction, shows that national-level databases significantly underreport disaster losses due to an overreliance on public sources and exclusion (or inaccessibility) of loss information from commercial as well as federal institutions that collect insured losses.


Also, past research has captured common weaknesses of national agency-led disaster loss databases, including:



  • over- or underreporting of certain hazard types (hazard bias)

  • gaps in historic records (temporal bias)

  • overreliance on direct and/or monetized losses (accounting bias)

  • focus on high impact and/or acute events while ignoring the extensive impacts of slow disasters or highly localized cascading disasters (threshold bias)

  • overrepresentation of densely populated and/or easily accessible areas (geography bias)

What lessons can be learned from past nationwide open data initiatives?

The National Weather Service’s Storm Events Database, the USDA’s Risk Management Agency’s Crop Data, and the CDC’s COVID-19 Data Modernization Initiative provide good templates for how to roll up data from the local to federal level. However, it is important to recognize that past initiatives, such as NOAA’s NIDIS initiative, have found it challenging to go beyond data collection on standard metrics of immediate loss and damage to also capture data on impacts and outcomes. Further, disaster loss and damage data are not currently integrated with other datasets that may capture secondary and cascading effects, such as, injuries, morbidities, and mortalities captured in CDC’s data.


Defining new standards that expand the range of attributes to be collected in consistent and interoperable formats would allow for moving beyond hazard and geographic silos, allowing data to be open, accessible, and usable. In turn, this will require new capacity and operational commitments, including an exploration of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and distributed ledger system (DLS) and blockchain technology, to undertake expanded data collection, sharing, and reporting across missions and scales.

How will the Open Disaster Data Initiative take account of data ethics and governance?

Aligning with guidance provided in the OSTP’s recent Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and several research collective initiatives in recent years, the Open Disaster Data Initiative should seek to make disaster resilience, vulnerability, loss, and damage data FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) and usable in CARE-full ways (collective benefit, with authority to control, for responsible, and, ethical use).

What is a technical corrections bill?

A technical corrections bill is a type of congressional legislation to correct or clarify errors, omissions, or inconsistencies in previously passed laws. Technical corrections bills are typically noncontroversial and receive bipartisan support, as their primary goal is to correct mistakes rather than to make substantive policy changes. Technical corrections bills can be introduced at any time during a congressional session and may be standalone bills or amendments to larger pieces of legislation. They are typically considered under expedited procedures, such as suspension of the rules in the House of Representatives, which allows for quick consideration and passage with a two-thirds majority vote. In the Senate, technical corrections bills may be considered under unanimous consent agreements or by unanimous consent request, which allows for passage without a formal vote if no senator objects. Sometimes more involved technical corrections or light policy adjustments happen during “vote-o-rama” in the Senate.


Technical corrections bills or reports play an important role in the legislative process, particularly during appropriations and budgeting, by helping to ensure the accuracy and consistency of proposed funding levels and programmatic changes. For example, during the appropriations process, technical corrections may be needed to correct funding levels or programmatic details that were inadvertently left out of the original bill. These technical changes can be made to ensure that funding is allocated to the intended programs or projects and that the language of the bill accurately reflects the intent of Congress.


Similarly, during the budgeting process, technical corrections may be needed to adjust estimates or projections based on new information or changes in circumstances that were not foreseen when the original budget was proposed. These technical changes can help to ensure that the budget accurately reflects the current economic and fiscal conditions and that funding priorities are aligned with the goals and priorities of Congress. For example, in 2021, Congress used a technical corrections bill to clarify budget allocations and program intent after Hurricane Ida to make recovery programs more efficient and help with overall disaster recovery program clarification. Similarly, in 2017, Congress relied on a technical corrections/suspension bill to clarify some confusing tax provisions related to previous legislation for relief from Hurricane Maria.