COBACORE: Exploring the potential of community-based emergency management

26th January 2015

COBACORE’s recent stakeholder engagement exercises have highlighted the importance of facilitating a localised ‘bottom-up’ or ‘grassroots’ form of emergency management – this could be led by the Affected Community with assistance and input from the Responding Community and Professional Responders.

The implementation of community-based climate adaption strategies was recently explored during an international conference on ‘Deltas in Times of Climate Change II’, which was held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands in late September 2014. The session, which was organised by the COBACORE partner Kim Anema of the Netherlands Red Cross and attended by a member of the Irish National Flood Forum, explored the need to build upon the capacities of the local Affected Community in order to strengthen community resilience to disaster events. The Affected Community representative discussed the need for communities to organise themselves, self-activate and canvas Professional Responding organisations for assistance in the form of training and resources.

The session found that, as it is the citizens who are ultimately affected by climate change, it is only logical that they should be part of the solution. For state authorities, the socio-economic and environmental challenges posed by climate change are an integral part of risk management and decision making processes. However, while government is becoming more perceptive to the input of the Affected Community in emergency preparation and management, there is both significant potential and demand for further state-backed engagement, training and education. New communication tools such as online disaster management platforms and social media will be crucial to further engaging Affected Communities.

A recent COBACORE platform evaluation session with the Skibbereen Flood Committee (based in Cork, Ireland) highlighted the importance of the local community as the first line of defence and response in an emergency. The importance of drawing on local knowledge and insight in emergency management was also discussed, as local knowledge is as important as expert knowledge; without both, knowledge is incomplete. In Skibbereen, the Affected Community have been successful in sharing this local knowledge with both the Responding and Professional Communities, with a number of community members even having been trained-up by the Municipal Authority on how to activate the town’s localised flood defence infrastructure if under threat from a flood event.

The COBACORE platform facilitates bottom-up emergency management through its marketplace function, which enables the Affected Community to match their needs with the capacities of the Responding Community, generating valuable real-time community intelligence for Professional Responders. The platform also enables the Affected Community to organise itself and respond efficiently to the emergency event using its activity workspace and notice board functionalities.