NASA Earth Science Disasters Program: Transitional Earth Observation Applications from Hazard to Risk through Exposure and Vulnerability

The NASA Disasters Program promotes innovative applications of Earth observations that leverage integrated systems approaches to understanding hazards and leveraging that understanding to inform and address risk through vulnerability and exposure on a global scale across the entire disaster lifecycle. The Program is inherently collaborative and transdisciplinary, creating key partnerships, funding thematic disaster risk research and maintaining engagement among diverse stakeholders and actors. Shared access and use of free and open geospatially enabled data for risk research, co-design and co-development are key program focuses.

How well communities prepare for and recover from disasters can have extensive impacts on lives and local economies. Earth observations and remote sensing provide innovative approaches for visualizing and managing systemic disaster risk and can directly enhance decision making from national to local levels. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction identifies explicitly the need for Earth observation data, and the role it can play in building productive and resilient communities. Disasters Program priorities are aligned with Sendai Framework and examples from tropical cyclone impacts in the Caribbean and Africa to cascading hazards related to wildfire and subsequent landslides will be examined.