Damage and event database for natural hazards

CESARE, coordinated by GeoSphere Austria, is currently developing a national damage and event database for natural hazards. In future, it will be used, among other things, for the ongoing monitoring and analysis of damage and losses according to international criteria as well as for improved risk analysis and the investigation of the effectiveness of protective measures. Following the test phase in Lower Austria and Styria, CESARE is currently being extended to the whole of Austria.

Extreme natural events cause major damage and endanger human lives, such as the heavy rainfall and storms in mid-September, with the resulting effects such as flooding, mudslides, landslides, snow pressure and avalanches. Continuous improvements in disaster prevention and warning systems are reducing losses and damage, but there is a lack of standardised data to provide a meaningful overall picture. Historically, various organisations in Austria have been collecting loss and event data for many decades according to different criteria, often only for certain areas.

For this reason, CESARE is currently the first standardised damage and event database for natural hazards in Austria. It fulfils the requirements of the United Nations and the European Union, as well as the national requirements for managing the effects of disasters.

"Austria has a very good database and information base in the field of natural hazards, albeit scattered in different databases and institutions," says Stefan Kienberger from GeoSphere Austria, head of CESARE, "but it is important to have an overall picture of the damage from the puzzle pieces of the various data sources. By integrating the individual datasets from the various organisations, we can illuminate the overall picture in order to ultimately quantify the damage and losses caused by the various natural hazards as robustly as possible with the available data."

CESARE is being set up and operated by GeoSphere Austria on the initiative of the United Nations ASDR platform (Austrian Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction).

"CESARE is a fundamental tool for all organisations dealing with natural hazards in Austria thanks to the broad cooperation between the numerous institutions working on disaster protection and prevention and represented in the ASDR platform," says Andreas Schaffhauser, Scientific Director General of GeoSphere Austria and coordinator of the ASDR platform.

CESARE currently covers the hazards of floods, avalanches, hurricanes and hail, forest fires and other forest damage, mass movements (mudslides, landslides, etc.) and earthquakes. The information is collected in cooperation with several organisations and federal states (disaster fund data) and enriched with data from media screenings and fire brigade deployment data.

GeoSphere Austria has also integrated meteorological data in order to better analyse past events and identify possible gaps in the recording of damage data and to be able to better analyse events afterwards.

In order to obtain as comprehensive a picture as possible of events and damage, a software tool is also being developed that searches and analyses the internet and social media around the clock for specific keywords (e.g. mudslide, storm, flood, dam break, fallen tree, etc.), including over 2000 online fire brigade websites. This means that the effects of extreme natural events are available in almost real time and are then available in the database in the long term (-> CRISP project).

Andreas Pichler, Deputy Head of the Torrent and Avalanche Control, Protection Forest Policy and Forest Fire Prevention Department at the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Regions and Water Management: "For us, CESARE is an important step towards being able to assess the appropriateness and effectiveness of protection measures throughout Austria on the basis of a sound database."

The analysis of the more than 140,000 events already in the CESARE database and the test phase with the federal states of Lower Austria and Styria showed that an event-based national damage database offers considerable added value compared to the use of individual data records.

The provinces of Lower Austria and Styria have been supporting CESARE since its inception with data from the disaster fund.

"The results to date already show the great benefits of CESARE for modern disaster risk management. The current events of September have clearly demonstrated the need for a solid and uniform assessment of damage and events," says project manager Stefan Kienberger, "what is important in the current phase is the expansion to other participating organisations and ensuring the provision of data from all federal states and the further intensification of cooperation between those involved."

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)