Power BI Dashboard for
UNDRR INFORM Risk Index
The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) maintains the subnational INFORM Risk index in Central Asia, South Caucasus and Southeastern Europe, an initiative that will contribute to the assessment and measuring of risks at regional, national and subnational levels, thus supporting decision-making at different stages of the disaster management cycle, specifically, prevention, preparedness and response. Kai Analytics was hired to develop a fully interactive dashboard based on the INFORM Risk Index data, to make decision making easier and more streamlined.
What We Did
Our data science and visual design team worked closely with the UNDRR program manager to develop a country and region-specific dashboard that highlights the hazards, vulnerability, and coping mechanisms of national and subnational regions.
Transformed a static infographic into an interactive dashboard to create an up to date and intuitive user experience for decision making.
Prepared and connected data from external sources such as country narratives, national flags, etc. This allows for real-time updates and ensures that future datasets can be seamlessly integrated.
Paying close attention to regional/national boundaries especially in areas that are facing regional conflicts, to create an inclusive tool.
3 Key Insights
Intuitive User Experience
We’ve allowed users to interact with the data by leveraging some native features of Power BI. When users hover over a national or subnational area of the regional map; they are presented with a heads up of key indices that explain the INFORM Risk Level of that region. Once the user has found an area of interest, they can easily drill down to see regional details. In this section, the user is presented with a more nuanced INFORM Risk Profile, including a country overview, map, and a visual comparison of the components in each risk category. This makes it easy to understand category scores, and see how components such as natural disasters or conflict may be aggravated by existing socio-economic factors, as well as the ability of institutions and infrastructure to bear the weight of a crisis.
Customized Shapefiles
In some areas on this map, border conflict makes it difficult to draw distinct political boundaries between subnational areas. If a public tool, managed and published by the UNDRR, to appear to endorse a contested political boundary. To avoid the risk of further conflicts around border regions, we worked with a modified map to identify sensitive areas. Customized Shapefiles mean that if a contested region is selected, the map is obscured. This is apparent in the ongoing geo-political conflict in Georgia’s Shida Kartli administrative region. The screenshot below compares the country drill down of Armenia with that of Georgia, where the map is obscured.
The boundaries and names shown and the designations used on this map do not imply official endorsement or acceptance by the UN or CESDDR.
Future Proofed
In order to support data-driven decisions making, policy makers need tools that are up-to-date and relevant. When making the transition from infographic to dashboard, we made the effort to create something that lasts. By taking care to document each step of our data preparation process, we’ve made it easy to transform and upload future datasets, and to use this dashboard as a template for other regions of interest. By connecting elements such as country narratives and flags to the external sources responsible for their creation, leaders can trust that their tools are not slowed down by slow administrative processes or missed updates.