Rapid Insights for Earlier Action: Big Data’s Role in Impact-Based Forecasting, Nowcasting, and Post-Disaster Damage and Loss Assessments

When disaster strikes, government agencies need reliable, easily readable, and readily available information on impacts so that they can make informed decisions on how to respond. This information is critical for targeting response and early recovery measures and to start mobilizing domestic and external resources. In practice, however, traditional methods for obtaining impact information have often been costly and taken a long time to complete after a disaster.

This brief discusses the promise of remote sensing and other big data particularly in rapid assessment frameworks to complement existing disaster impact assessment practice and speed up the formulation of likely and actual needs. It focuses on the potential of big data applications to provide rapid, relevant, and granular information on the socioeconomic impacts of disasters at relatively low cost, in near real-time (through nowcasting and post-disaster damage and loss assessments) or even in advance of a disaster (through impact-based forecasting) to enable a timely and well-informed response.