Disaster Impact & Humanitarian Need Assessment Lab
The Disaster Impact & Humanitarian Need Assessment Lab supports the research activities and practical courses on impact assessment (DIA, EIA, SEIA & SIA), risk assessment, multi-hazard risk assessment, risk evaluation and humanitarian need assessment. Moreover, this lab also supports the research themes like cost-benefit analysis and forecast-based financing.
The DIA Lab will conduct research activities mainly on the following research themes:
- Trend analysis of the past disasters as well as their socio-economic impacts on a long term basis.
- Disaster Impact Assessment (Environmental Impact Assessment, Strategic Environmental Impact Assessment and Social Impact Assessment)
- Risk Assessment Methods (Quantitative Risk Assessment, event-tree analysis, risk-matrix approach and indicator-based approach), their inherent uncertainties, multi-hazard risk assessment and risk evaluation (risk perception, risk communication and risk acceptability) strategies are crucial to decision support system and facilitate the policy-making process.
- Capacity analysis of different government as well as non-government institutions in handling the previous disasters. Rigorous analysis wills also e carried out to find out the strength and gaps of the institutions in handling the emergency management. This will require the use of extensive SWOT analysis.
- Damage and Loss Assessment of the disasters following ECLAC methodology. The application of the ECLAC methodology is very famous but there are limited numbers of cases in Bangladesh where this technique has been extensively used. The ECLAC method will be used and proper modifications of this method will be done before the use in the field. Moreover, OECD-DAC criteria to evaluate the response and recovery mechanism are also addressed.
- Cost-Benefit Analysis of development projects with large environmental impact will be carried out. Most of the development projects in the country go through a weak CBA and the impact of development in creating disaster vulnerability is not analyzed. Forecast based financing (FbF) is also critical to address extended humanitarian needs.
Major Research Tools
- UN ECLAC methodology for Disaster Damage and Loss Assessment
- SWOT Analysis
- Social Accounting Matrix (SAM)
- Regression Analysis and Econometric Modelling
- Social Surveying
- Longer-Term Prediction and Forecasting models
- CBA and FbF
- ILWIS, HAZUS, INFORM, CAPRA-CRISIS and the Openquake Risk modeling tool