72-hour Rapid Assessment – Institutionalization and validation of the approach

Venue: Tashi Namgyel Resort-Paro
Date: 27-29^nd March 2021
Organizer: UN World Food Programme in collaboration with Department of Disaster Management, MoHCA
Participants: Ministry of Agriculture and Forests, Ministry of Works and Human Settlement, National Land Commission, DeSuung Office, Department of Disaster Management & UN WFP.

Background
The 72-hour rapid assessment enables a country to respond to a disaster within 72 hours, providing initial impact assessment in sudden on-set disaster scenario to fill in the initial information gap immediately after the disaster. This approach works the best when various relevant stakeholders/clusters contribute with data, validation and provision of information.

The 72-hour rapid assessment approach for Bhutan has been implemented as part of the emergency preparedness and response initiative to develop and strengthen the capacity of government and partners to prepare and respond to shocks. A workshop has been planned in the first quarter of 2021 for the 72-hour Technical Working Group (72-hour TWG), to institutionalize and validate findings.

Purpose
The purpose of the workshop is to capture the views of the 72-hour TWG on the methods and tools applied to ensure national capacity strengthening in disaster preparedness and response. The workshop is planned for two and half days, with the first day covering all the 72-hour development phases for Bhutan. The second and third day will be focusing to strengthen the hands-on capabilities of GIS analysts on 72- approach and test under the technical vulnerability and geospatial analysis.

Planned Outcome

The workshop will focus on five objectives, intended to:

1. Strengthen and capacitate the 72-hour TWG on the assessment approach and coordination:
   Train and agree on the overall framework, covering different 72-hour assessment phases pre and post disaster, GIS trainings, data preparedness and linkages between the different phases.
2. Train and share the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI):
   Provide access to SDI Data Hub on a centralized sever, including maintaining, storing and accessing cleaned metadata with all required georeferenced information and data layers.
3. Introduce and validate communication and data collection tools:
   A sample version of both the report template and field data collection questionnaire will be presented to stakeholders for inputs and finalization
4. Define and agree on the criteria for the activation of the 72-hour assessment:
   Identifying the required minimum criteria for the activation of the 72-hour process (e.g. the epicenter, magnitude of the earthquake, priority locations, impact etc.)
5. Develop a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) document, including agreed activation criteria and roles and responsibilities:
   1) Agreeing on commonly accepted standard activation criteria and procedures; and examine how the 72-hour rapid assessment can be undertaken in a systematic manner according to agreed and coordinated tasks. Also, this includes confirming the members of the 72-hour TWG and establishing a list of focal points for each organization, data point reference and by responsibility. The list needs to identify members key roles in the process ranging from i) regular data sharing and update when new indicators become available;
   ii) data preparedness, cleaning and validation;
   iii) GIS data analysis;
   iv) reporting;
   v)review and validation of assessment report findings;
   vi) field data collection coordination;
   vii)coordination and validation with clusters etc.