13. Developing an ICT-Based Toolbox for Resilient Capacity Building: Challenges, Obstacles and Approaches

Resilience is now more than a buzzword, as we learned from the impact of several recent very large-scale disasters around the world. Both the international academic and policy communities recognize that the accumulation and reduction of disaster risk is closely intertwined with the fields of sustainable development, environmental protection and climate change, as well as humanitarianism. It is important that policies in these areas are designed to be mutually reinforcing, whether at the local, national or international level. With the increasing pace of interconnectivity in current social-ecological systems, there are many challenges and obstacles to overcome, including a lack of breakthroughs in theoretical studies of complex dynamic systems, a lack of knowledge brokers needed to improve communication between science and policy, and the ever present difficulty of developing and evaluating multidisciplinary education, training and research projects under the current academic system. In this paper, by discussing challenges and obstacles in the development of the science-policy interface, the framework for an ICT-based toolbox is proposed that consists of four major components, including: data collection, analysis and dissemination, simulations based on both natural science models and agent-based models driven by social regulations and economic rules, and an interactive visualization platform. These are developed with a fourfold purpose: (1) facilitating knowledge gathering that will cumulate in the classroom, (2) sharing knowledge and equalizing access to knowledge amongst multidisciplinary research groups, (3) transferring knowledge for use in training, and ultimately, (4) applying knowledge in decision-making processes (in government or elsewhere).