Why was this blog created?

This blog was established in the days after the Haiti earthquake, and will likely focus on this disaster for the near future, but I would like this to be a repository for all manner of information on disasters, hazards, risk, and related matters. The amount of information here will ebb and flow with the salience of disasters and policy and research agendas. If you would like to be a contributing author, let me know!

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Things I want to post here, and things I don't know

If the focus is on Haiti for now, there's a lot of information that could be brought together here and maintained for the research community and for interested citizens. With this in mind, I invite folks to comment on posts here or to send ideas to me at tom.birkland@gmail.com. Some of the things I'd like to see are:
  • Reports from charities/NGOs about their activities in Haiti, and information about the most effective ways to give resources to aid agencies.
  • Background information on Haiti, including social, cultural, economic, and other data. 
  • Background information on the nature of health care and public health in Haiti, both before and after the earthquake
  • Background on the organization of Haitian politics in the years before the earthquake, and how that system performed in past disasters (hurricanes) and how it is recovering--if at all--from this disaster
  • Information on Haiti's infrastructure--ports, water, sewer, power, telecom, hospitals, transport, airports, and so on. 
  • Scholarly literature on disasters broadly that would be relevant to this disaster
  • Scholarly literature and good popular literature that would help explain disasters in general, and this disaster in particular, to a lay audience, including decison makers and journalists that need background on disasters to do their jobs effectively.
These ideas are in no particular order--they're just things I'd like to know more about, and I suspect others will too. I will be collecting this sort of material in the months to come, and will share it here, or, if the volume is great enough, on a linked website.

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