Developing an Integrated Tool for Municipal Hazard and Risk Identification and Mitigation

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Emergency management has traditionally focused on preparing for single incidents within specific geographies. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside incidents of civil unrest and seasonal natural disasters, has forced emergency managers to adopt new approaches for responding to multiple, concurrent events. While the COVID-19 pandemic required new methods for community evacuation and relocation during seasonal natural hazard events, it reinforced that disaster risk is strongly interwoven with socio-economic and cultural conditions. Trends of community vulnerability to contagion have highlighted serious social inequalities between and within regions of many countries, including in Canada. Furthermore, the extent to which communities have or have not been able to cope demonstrates that risk, vulnerability, and resilience are not predefined conditions, but rather are constructs of the intersections of many factors faced by communities exposed to combinations of different hazards. There is currently no single tool in Canada that provides planners and emergency managers with an integrated visualization of hazards and risks across the natural, social, and built environments.CHaRIS - The Canadian Hazard and Risk Information System - will provide an innovative map-based statistical analysis tool to help assess, visualize, and communicate different levels of community exposure and vulnerability to hazards and risk in Canada. This index will demonstrate to emergency managers and public policy decision-makers the importance of a cooperative approach to sustainable disaster risk reduction, incorporating real-time and archival data from the natural, social, and built environments, and improving understanding of the risks faced by communities.