Improving the Role of Information Systems in Anticipatory Disaster Risk Reduction (IRIS)

人道主义机构能够利用天气（和其他）预报来预测人道主义危机。例如，当预测到热浪或飓风时，可以提前将供应品移动到位，并定位或预先分配紧急供应品。这减少了总体影响和救灾费用。然而，在灾害发生前提供资金需要对预测有高度的信心，以避免资源分配不当或浪费的可能性。目前有许多预报，但并非所有预报都附有对预报质量的评估。例如，它可能是预测是过于自信，预测事件的次数比它实际观察到的，或者它可能是信心不足，未能预测的事件，然后发生。我们建议开发和演示一个通用的方法来测量和显示预测的信息内容，使用一个新的想法，这是基于现有的研究和免费提供的数据。这将使人道主义机构在预测中有足够的信息时，能够满怀信心地预测人道主义危机，并只有在知道有信心该计划将有效时，才能执行基于预测的融资计划，如保险或预期资金分配。

Humanitarian agencies are able to use weather (and other) forecasts to act in anticipation of humanitarian crises. For example, when a heatwave or hurricane is forecast, supplies can be moved into position early and emergency supplies positioned or pre-distributed. This reduces the overall impact and the cost of responding to the disaster. However, financing in advance of a disaster requires a high level of confidence in the forecast, to avoid the possibility of misallocated or wasted resources. Many forecasts are currently available but not all are accompanied by an assessment of the forecast quality. For example, it may be that the forecast is over-confident, predicting an event more times than it is actually observed, or it could be under confident, failing to predict events which do then occur.We propose to develop and demonstrate a general method of measuring and displaying the information content of forecasts, using a novel idea which is based on existing research and freely available data. This will allow humanitarian agencies to act confidently in anticipation of humanitarian crises when there is sufficient information in the forecast, and to implement forecast-based financing schemes such as insurance or anticipatory funding allocation only when there is known to be confidence that the scheme will be effective.