DBMS for Infrastructure Inventory: A Tool for Climate Resilience Planning in Cities - India

DBMS for Infrastructure Inventory: A Tool for Climate Resilience Planning in Cities can be used as a powerful information tool by city planners and decision makers to aid climate resilience planning activities. It bridges the data gaps by collating multi-sectoral information in a single place.

Fast facts:

This activity’s information tool has been tested in two Indian cities;
Their location data was represented through sector wide Geographic Information System (GIS) maps which were also linked to the inventory;
In order to understand the impact of sea level rise on the infrastructure assets, several scenarios were plotted on the digital elevation model (DEM) datasets which were then overlaid on the sector-wide maps for the two cities.

The problem

Maintaining inventories of key urban infrastructure assets and services is not a regular practice in Indian cities. In the absence of a centralized and standardized inventory, city planners and decision makers are constantly grappling with data problems for their regular decision making, making it difficult to conduct risk and vulnerability assessments.

The solution

This activity utilizes GIS-based spatial assessments to identify vulnerable hotspots, sectors and infrastructure assets in two Indian coastal cities. This tool enables decision making for day to day urban planning as well as climate resilience planning by providing multi-sectoral data at a single platform. The format of the inventory ensures that the new data fields (for climate resilience planning) is color coded and presented alongside the existing ones so as to enable recognition of these data heads for climate resilience planning efforts. The system provides features like creating database structure of various asset types, storing and updating information about them, and retrieving data as per the inputs required for climate resilient planning activities. The requests for desired information from the database can be made in the form of query by using Structured Query Language. This database was developed as a Windows based application and the application has been developed using Microsoft technologies.

Helping the planet

This activity facilitates informed decision making when it comes to climate change adaptation. Informed decision making in the long term positively benefits citizens, vulnerable communities and the environment.

Helping people

The primary beneficiaries of this activity are the urban local bodies in the two coastal Indian cities. Their inputs were taken into account at all key stages. A key component of the activity involved training these officials on operating and managing this tool. When a city’s decision makers are equipped with database management systems like these, then the citizens of that city will benefit in a longer term, as the city is better prepared to deal with the impacts of climate change by having access to key information like vulnerable zones/locations, sectors, communities etc.

Scaling Up

This tool can further be scaled up to reach more beneficiaries and create a larger impact by becoming a web-based application. This will enable data preservation, data retrieval and data updates from anywhere and anytime by authorized users.