Welcome to DesInventar

A diversity of users have an interest on DesInventar due to the posibility of having and managing a homogeneous and organized record of the existing information about disasters. It is a product that also helps to visualize the recorded phenomena in space and time.

LA RED has developed this instrument to provide the diverse roleplayers in risk management activities (researchers, research institutes, governments and emergency and disaster attention national planning systems, regional and local prevention bodies, aid organisms, international and bilateral agencies, so as to organized communitites and the media) with a product for the storage, processing, homogeneous analisis and representation of disasters, these being the adverse effects over populations, property and infrastructure that are vulnerable to natural and socionatural phenomena. The design and structure of DesInventar were conceived as flexible and adaptable, which makes it applicable to diverse units of a territorial, political-administrative, planning, environmental, management, institutional operations character, with resolution levels that range from national to detailed views (provinces, cities).

DesInventar is nowadays a methodology and an instrument used systematically in Latin American and Caribbean countries and recently (Dec 2002) its implementation started in India (Orissa State). DesInventar is used by research and academic groups, cities, provinces and institutes of environmental management. More than 20 DesInventar’s databases are already in public domain in the Section called WebSite DesInventar2.

The LatinAmerican Network of Social Studies on Disaster Prevention, constituted in 1992, formulated in its Agenda of Research and Organic Constitution (LA RED, COMECSO/ITDG, Lima, January 1993) that:

However, due to the absence of systematic, homogeneous and disaster type comparable records, as well as to the absence of effects of the occurrence of threteaning events in the frame of the vulnerability conditions in each region, country or city, on the one hand and on the other hand, conceptions such as considering that disasters are only the effects of those events of great extent and of big impacts, have made invisible the thousands of small and middle disasters that annually occur in the countries of regions like Latin America, Caribe, Asia and Africa.

From another point of view, there are many institutions and researchers around the world that are interested in the subject. They use diverse tools to systematize the information about disasters. This information being generally databases or physical archives designed with specific criteria and very concrete or sectorial interests in unequal formats. Additionally there is a great volume of information ready to be stored and systematized , mainly from newspaper sources. This scattered information has to be compiled, homogeinized and analized. It also has to be referenced geography- cally because disasters are regionalized variables, (vulnerated communities and infrastructure) due to the effects produced by each type of event (threat).

A common objective in the regions and countries of Latin America and the Caribe, Asia and Africa is that of generating abilities to analize and represent in space and time, all the threats, vulnerabilities and risks in a retrospective and prospective way. So that they can be used in aplications on risk management, in tasks that go from disaster mitigation to attention and post-event recovery. The qualitative and quantitative evaluation of vulnerability and risk growth, requires the availability of a solid documental base and of a record of the occurred disasters as well as of the ones that are happening daily, and of the ones that will happen.

As a contribution to the accomplishment of these common goals for diverse regions, LA RED started at the end of 1993 with the project, Disaster Inventory in Latin America, which in its pilot project stage consisted on:

a) Discussing and meeting conceptual and methodological criteria over the analitical treatment of the small, middle and big disasters;

b) Store the information about disasters that happened in the period 1990-1994, from available sources like Latin American countries (México, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú y Argentina) and

c) Develop a computer system tool for such purpose. DesInventar is a synthesis of the process by which the research groups committed to LA RED suggest a conceptual and methodological unified frame about disasters and the tool to achieve the development of the proposed objectives. The basic criteria that guides DesInventar are:

- All the inventories have the same variables for measuring effects, with a homogeneous basic clasification of events.

- The stored and processed information is entered into the timescale and into a georeferenced spatial level.

- The inventories may be treated analitically, through computer system tools, as a basic requirement to produce comparative researches and to support the decision taking over actions on mitigation and in general, over actions taken on risk management.

DesInventar is also an instrument that helps to visualize, in space and time, the registrated phenomena, by means of its complementary tool, the Query Module or DesConsultar.

DesInventar has been the result of national research groups around LA RED in Colombia that are in charge of the coordination and software development (OSSO-Universidad del Valle, CompuArte-PROMAP). These groups (besides those already mentioned) are: in Peru (ITDG), in Mexico (CIESAS), Guatemala (FLACSO-General Secretariat), El Salvador (PRISMA), Costa Rica (FLACSO, National Emergency Commission), Ecuador (EPN) and Argentina (CENTRO).

The institutions and researchers comitted to the development of DesInventar are grateful for the economic support from ODA- Overseas Development Administration, today DFID - Department for International Development (United kingdom), which funds allowed to perform diverse international workshops so as to support the efforts of each group in the adquisition and processing of the information and in the production of the computer systems instrument (software) and its extension to other countries. Acknowledgements also for CEPREDENAC in Central America and the GTZ (Germany), that have made possible to extend the project to other countries of this region and to the Caribe. To the National Emergency Commission in Panama, that has become a user and has cooperated in the development of DesInventar, including creative aplications in the field of emergency and disaster attention. For the development of version 6.2 (32 bits), there has been the support of the united Nations Program for Development PNUD and of the IAI-(inter American Institution for Global Change Research)-LA RED project which is “Disaster risk Management in Latin America ENSO”.

DesInventar 6 .x. is a software development at 32 bits, based on the 5.4.1 16 bits version. The development team is integrated by computer system engineers and development assistants from LA RED and from OSSO, with contributions from the United Nations Program for Development-PNUD and from the project?Disaster Risk Management ENSO in Latin America?,having the sponsorship of the Interamerican Institution for Global Change Research-IAI.

Development Team:
Javier Andrés Mena
Julio Cesar Serje de la Ossa
Jhon Henry Caicedo
Mario Andrés Yandar

Advisors:
Fernando Ramírez
Cristina Rosales
Andrés Velásquez

Betausers:
Cristina Rosales
Nayibe Jiménez
Claudia Yolima Quintero
Wilman Rodríguez