The EM-DAT database (a WHO initiative) is a huge repository of information about disasters that has been built up over more than 40 years, and Advance Aid has already been mining this data to help develop its business plan – if you can use historical data to predict where disasters are most likely to happen, you can certainly fine-tune your pre-positioning and warehousing strategy.

Now SciDevNet has produced a whole section of its website devoted to covering “Remote Sensing for Natural Disasters” .

SciDevNet’s Sian Lewis puts this into context, “Developing countries suffer more than 95 per cent of all deaths caused by natural disasters.  Their high population densities and poor infrastructure, coupled with unstable landforms and exposure to severe weather events, makes them particularly vulnerable…Just last year (2008), natural disasters affected 214 million people, killed more than 235,000 and cost more than US$190 billion.”

And she goes on to outline how satellite technology can make a difference, “Remote sensing — the science of acquiring information about the Earth using remote instruments, such as satellites — is inherently useful for disaster management. Satellites offer accurate, frequent and almost instantaneous data over large areas anywhere in the world. When a disaster strikes, remote sensing is often the only way to view what is happening on the ground.”

But there are, inevitably, problems – shortage of money, low bandwidth Internet connections, the lack of active space programmes (understandably) amongst developing countries, and a linked lack of political awareness of the role that satellite data can play in helping with development and combating disasters.

But there are developing countries with satellites – the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced plans in October for two Earth observation satellites, which will join six already in orbit.  South Africa launched its first commercial-grade satellite in September.  Brazil, China, Thailand and Vietnam have satellites, as do Algeria and Nigeria.

Lewis ends with a plea, “The time is ripe for engaging developing country researchers and policymakers in remote sensing for disaster management.  Data and software costs are plummeting, information communication technology is developing quickly, and tools such as Google Earth are starting to get policymakers enthused about satellite imagery.”

The people most at risk are the 300,000 mainly Somali refugees in the Kakuma and Dadaab camps.  Kakuma is in northwestern Kenya and Dadaab in the east on the border with Somalia.   The overcrowded Dadaab complex of three camps was built to hold some 90,000 people but its population has swollen to three times that, in the process becoming home to more refugees than any other site in the world, according to the UNHCR.

U.N. aid agencies have activated contingency plans, bringing food, water treatment chemicals and mosquito nets to flood-prone areas.  The flooding, which follows on from a period of drought, is also bringing disease in its wake – the WHO is reporting that cholera has already infected 10,000 people this year in Kenya.

Elsewhere in Kenya, hundreds of people have been evacuated from their homes in the central part of the country after mudslides, brought on by the heavy rain, destroyed houses.