ROI & Social Value of Drone Data for Disaster Risk Management

Solution Background

Through our interactions with national and sub-national disaster risk managment stakeholders, during the conferences we co-organize and through Flying Labs, we kept on hearing the same: we cannot afford to integrate drones into our DRM work on a continuous basis because of their high cost. This feedback translates into: one of the key hurdles to include drones, data and AI into daily DRM practice is the fact that drones and data are seen as a cost, and not an investment that generates both economic and social returns and value. 

When investigating this issue further, here is what we've learned:

• DRM stakeholders who directly engage with geospatial data see and appreciate the value of drones and geospatial data-driven decision making for their DRM practices. This as they are the ones acting on the data, and turning the data into action.
• They however lack the economic and ROI-based arguments that high-level decision makers seek, to support the case for including drone data into their budgets, not as a pilot project, but a permanent budget line.

We decided to launch this initiative as a solution space, as we know that a broad group of stakeholders will need to come together to turn the idea of a "formula" to calculate the ROI and social value of drone data for DRM into reality. We have learned that others have tried (however not in a co-creative way), and failed. We are eager to give this a try, in an iterivate way, and by including as wide a stakeholder group as possible. This to build on the power of collective intelligence to find a solution to this complex issue.

Solution Content

We aim to create a cost/benefit analysis tool that consolidates drone cost vs avoided losses, producing finance-ready outputs including benefit–cost ratios, avoided-loss estimates, and social return on investment (SROI) to support geospatial-data driven disaster risk management (DRM) investment decisions. 

Seen the complexity of the task, we are taking both a multi-step, iterative and multi-stakeholder approach. And will update this solutions space page as the initiative evolves.

What's Next & How You Can Get Involved

We are currently in our initial phase, the desk research phase. As an outcome, we plan to publish a baseline white paper.

In parallel, we take advantage of our DRM Conferences and ongoing collaborative learning projects to gather data with key stakeholders in co-creation sessions, and to onboard stakeholders from government agencies, NGOs, civil society oganizations, community groups and technology companies to the next phase of the initiative.

We are also looking for funders who are interested in supporting this initiative.