COBACORE – a tool to assist communities in disaster management

24th October 2014

The COBACORE consortium recently met in Madrid, Spain from 13th-15th October to mark the halfway point of the COBACORE project. This meeting was timely, and reflected the progress that has been made to date within the COBACORE project in terms of meeting goals and objectives, and satisfying the requirements of recognised end-users, such as the Red Cross. One of the key outputs of the meeting was setting the frame and refining the scope for research and development activity for the remainder of the project up to March 2016, building from the key focus points developed in the opening 18 months of the project.

The consortium discussed how technology-based solutions have the potential to challenge the traditional top-down model of humanitarian action, enabling multi-sector collaborations and empowering communities. The COBACORE system has the potential to add significant value to the disaster management cycle – response, recovery and reconstruction activities, through its assistance and support of key stakeholder groups including professional responders, municipal authorities and crisis-affected communities.

 

Post-Disaster: Respond, Recover, Redevelop and Reconstruct Together

The consortium reaffirmed the important role that active collaboration and partnership-working play in enabling the affected community to influence the recovery and reconstruction of their area post-disaster. Crucially, active engagement with those agencies responsible for, and leading, recovery and reconstruction activities enables affected communities to influence policy and re-development proposals for their respective areas.

Post-disaster activity: Where COBACORE can add-value

Together, the consortium decided that the COBACORE system would provide the greatest value in both the ‘transitional’ post-disaster phase (transition from response to recovery), and in the latter post-disaster stages of recovery and reconstruction. However, the discussion also highlighted the need to undertake further research into the transition between the post-disaster response and recovery phases with a view to understanding the key activities and characteristics of this phase, the nature of the organisations involved and the interactions between same.But the main thing at https://globalmarch.org/cialis-generic/ is not to overdo it with dosages.

The COBACORE platform will provide its users with different tools depending on the nature of the post-disaster phase, with the potential to be supported by a dedicated COBACORE coordination and activity management team. Next steps for the COBACORE project include a number of evaluation exercises designed to get feedback from potential end-users on the COBACORE vision and platform. The evaluation sessions will include representatives from municipal authorities, disaster response and recovery professionals and affected communities and will help identify further desirable platform functionalities.