Situational Awareness for Community-Based Resilience to Disasters and Climate Change

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Disasters and climate change affect millions of people around the world, causing billions of dollars in damages annually and harming efforts towards sustainable development. They are especially pernicious problems in that poor and marginalized communities are often the most affected, and struggle the most to recover in the aftermath. Building societal resilience to disasters and climate change is a major priority of the Canadian government. As part of the government's contributions to the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goal (Government of Canada 2018), Canada has committed to making cities and human settlements, both at home and abroad, safe, resilient, and sustainable. The technologies I will investigate through this research program support disaster and climate risk identification, risk communication, impact assessment, and response coordination and are central to societal efforts to understand and manage these complex challenges. Improvements to the tools and information systems that improve our ability to prevent, mitigate, and respond to the impacts of disaster and climate change stand to help innumerable people in Canada and around the world. This research program applies methods and theory from crisis informatics and human-centered design to the challenge of situational awareness, a core concept in emergency management that describes how people collectively perceive and coordinate response to crisis. The framing of situational awareness draws together diverse use cases and information and communication technologies (ICTs) used in disaster management into a program that is both comprehensive and tractable. By focusing on the specific information needs of communities, this research will respond to findings in crisis informatics that stress the importance of informal response to disaster. I will develop and evaluate novel mobile technologies as well as contribute new understandings how ICTs can support communities' ability to mitigate and recover from disasters and the impacts of climate change. In sum, this program will develop and implement a fundamentally new disposition towards the design of ICTs in disaster. It: 1) treats at-risk and affected communities as knowledgeable and resourceful; 2) accounts for the diverse information needs of users; and 3) recognizes the importance of emergent response groups and the role of civic technology organizations can play in coordinating between such groups and official disaster response entities in government and the humanitarian sector. Disasters and climate change provide complex and important real-world settings to advance the theoretical agenda around core concerns in HCI related to the social and environmental impacts of computing. This program will therefore also contribute to research in areas such as sustainable HCI, social computing, and social design.