The Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery: The Risk Data Fellows (2nd edition)

Many low- and lower-middle-income countries face significant gaps in disaster and climate risk knowledge, leaving communities vulnerable to natural hazards and climate change. Despite advances in digital tools, most disaster risk data are produced by experts in advanced economies, resulting in a lack of localized, context-specific vulnerability and fragility functions. This knowledge gap limits governments’ and communities’ ability to make informed investment decisions and integrating disaster risk information into resilience planning. The challenge is further compounded by limited access to reliable data, insufficient local expertise, and the absence of scalable, community-driven solutions.  

Building on the success of the first Risk Data Fellows programme, this second edition empowers a new generation of local data scientists and leverages community-led data collection to bridge the knowledge gap in disaster and climate risk. The initiative consists of two main components: 

1. Risk Data Fellows Programme: 

Ten young technical professionals from fragile and climate-vulnerable countries will be selected for a six-month fellowship, embedded with World Bank operational teams. Fellows will work on real-world risk data challenges, including data analytics, readiness assessments, risk communication, machine learning, and earth observation. They will receive training in areas such as nature-based solutions, resilient housing, and early warning systems, and contribute to developing new risk datasets and tools. 

2. Community-Supported Vulnerability Assessments: 

The project pilots a community-led, low-cost approach to collecting in-situ data for needed to inform exposure and vulnerability in risk assessments. Local communities, supported by NGOs and trained in open-source tools, will gather structural, damage, hazard event, socioeconomic, and environmental data - especially after disaster events. The workflows will be designed for implementation in fragile and vulnerable contexts, accounting for operational constraints and challenges inherent to data collection in these environments. 

This project will strengthen resilience in ten vulnerable countries by training local experts and communities to collect and use disaster and climate risk data, ensuring that this information informs investment decisions. The Risk Data Fellows programme and community-driven efforts will produce open-source tools and knowledge products, ensuring risk data are accurate, localized, sustainable, and scalable. By empowering local data scientists and providing digital public goods, the project will make disaster risk information more accessible and actionable, establishing a model that can be replicated globally. 

Risk Data Library Standard: making it easier to work with disaster and climate risk data (worldbank.org)

Risk Data Library

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