In November 2019, while on a trip to Australia to discuss the power of technology to make a difference in the aftermath of natural disasters, I saw firsthand the devastation caused by historic bushfires raging throughout the country.
Sadly, devastating bushfires are still burning on the continent, putting more and more lives at risk and destroying entire communities. As the fires persist, the smoke in Sydney and elsewhere has rendered the air quality hazardous. There’s been a national spike in hospital visits, many to treat breathing problems.
Unfortunately, Australia is not alone in being ravaged by natural disaster.
In 2019, we also saw wildfires raging through California and the Amazon. Typhoon Hagibis devastated Japan’s central and northern regions, and first responders and volunteers are still supporting survivors after Hurricane Dorian tore through the Bahamas earlier this fall. Puerto Rico is reeling after a series of earthquakes, made all the worse for the damage still being repaired following Hurricane Maria in 2017.
From historic hurricanes to floods to ongoing wildfires, the world faces daily reminders of the growing impact of natural disasters.
In September, the Switzerland-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) announced a record 7 million people were displaced as a result of natural disasters in the first half of 2019, predicting this would more than triple to 22 million as we approach the end of the year. (For context for the magnitude of this problem, the IDMC reported 3.8 million people were displaced by violent conflict in that same timeframe.)
While the impact of natural disasters is felt hardest in the local communities where they strike, the trauma shared globally between people who survive these events also highlights the fact that these global catastrophes need a global response. One that can match the scale of the problem and empower relief organizations to meet the challenge head on.
In many regions of the world, the timely implementation of early-warning systems that use data and texting platforms to issue warnings of approaching disasters may have helped many of the 7 million people who were displaced by alerting them so they could seek shelter. In India and Bangladesh alone, 3.4 million people were evacuated from their homes when Cyclone Fani hit in May. Given the scale of natural disasters that occur around the world, however, we’re fighting a problem that is increasing to the point where emergency responders and relief organizations are stretched to their breaking point.
I believe the answer lies in open sourcethe technological practice in which the source code for a given application is provided, for free, to the public, where it can be used by virtually anyone. Open-source code can allow local, community-driven solutions to be iterated upon, improved, and scaled globally.