Based on European strategies or directives towards disaster risk reduction, civil protection and climate change adaptation (e.g. SENDAI, UPMC), respective national implementation strategies or action plans have already been or are to be set in place. In accordance with these strategies, national obligations or activities such as:
- Regular national risk assessment
- Risk management and risk reduction strategy
- Reporting to UCPM
- Reporting to Sendai;
- Reporting to Flood Directive
- Supporting Regional/Local Climate Adaptation Strategy
have to be initiated, organized and prepared. One general need for member states in general and Austria in particular therefore is to define processes for strengthening and facilitating the link across different international and EC policies.
Within the UNISDR Sendai framework, the Austrian national platform has created an action plan according to the Sendai’s 4 priorities of actions.
The Austrian national action plan foresees the implementation of a national event and loss data base, based on already existing national data and information infrastructures. This data-base should enable all platform members to participate, share their data, learn from each other and in the end support the Austrian reporting and management tasks.
For the latter purposes, different data streams and sources, which have been developed over time due to various reasons, have to be identified, brought together, quality checked, harmonized and transformed such that they are compliant the respective reporting framework (for instance the different Sendai indicators).
Only in this manner the local scale data (maybe even in situ measurements) can be linked to the national and further on European level and in addition associated with relevant indicators according EC and global directives.
In order to establish a national data infrastructure for risk analysis and management in a mid-term perspective, best practices according to methodological approaches, data structure and analysis, event identifier governance as well as software clients for disaster risk assessment are needed.