Speakers For Inter-agency Data Sharing To Ensure Climate Resilient Cities

DUBAI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 10th Dec, 2023) The Speakers at a panel discussion on data sharing for climate resilient cities have demanded the government to ensure inter-agency data sharing, use of cutting edge technology and accessible information platforms to ensure climate resilient cities in Pakistan.

“An inter-agency data sharing governance system would be established that will involve creating a new centralized entity with the mandate to acquire, store or stream all available data from relevant agencies or empowering existing agencies by hazard type within their jurisdiction mandate to manage data acquisition and dissemination efficiently, with a focus on scalability, cybersecurity and privacy”, Awais M. Sumra, Federal Secretary, Ministry of Planning, Development and Special Initiative at a session on “Using data to build climate resilient cities in Pakistan”, organized at Conference of Parties (COP28), Dubai in Pakistan Pavilion, a news release said.

“The first generation multi hazard early warning system focused on communicating flood forecast or drought forecast either to the government agencies or to the people, but they didn’t include the information of early action or anticipatory action. Early warning actions can be made more effective if we include early action information into that”, Dr Asim Zia who is a Professor of Public Policy and Computer Science in the Department of Community Development and Applied Economics and the Director of the Institute of Environmental Diplomacy and Security (IEDs) at the University of Vermont. It is critical to include early warning and early action in short term planning as well as long-term planning, he added. We need to have advisories at household level that will save the lives of many people. Crowdsourcing technologies and citizen/community science approaches by deploying sensors can provide critical data for model calibration and validation to forecast air quality and water quality.

Operational agencies, e.g., EPA, can also deploy sensor networks to collect real-time air quality and water quality data.

He said that there is need to establish an inter-agency data sharing governance system. Currently, there are some good examples of data sharing (e.g., PMD with WAPDA, IRSA and Indus Commission to generate short to medium term flood forecasts) that can serve as successful examples. Data flows in many cases are, however, either non-existent or non-operational.

Flows of data between NDMA and operational forecasting agencies (PMD, FFC, SUPARCO, GCISC) need to be improved both ways, i.e. NDMA monitoring data of hazards can be used through “active learning” to improve the forecast skill of agency models, while improved forecast skill of these models from operational agencies can be used to beef up the communication capacity of NDMA to its downstream agencies (e.g. PDMAs, district government etc.), e.g. through improved visualizations of hazards and their impacts.

There are some opportunities to improve resource efficiency by reducing the redundancies among different agencies for data collection, and clear enunciation of “operational” agency mandates. Currently, there is some overlap among SUPARCO, PMD and NDMA that could be reduced by clear enunciation of operational goals of each of these agencies.

“Communities are connected to the environment; we can use that information to build AI. Community knowledge can be combined with the institutional data produced by SUPARCO and NASA”, said Dr. Maaz Gardezi, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology Virginia Tech.