RIMES has co-developed and operationalized several Decision Support Systems (DSS) for transforming hazard information into impact-based forecasting to aid decision-making across multiple sectors – disaster management, agriculture, transportation, energy, finance, health, and water resources being the major ones.
Decision-makers in these sectors, especially in the developing regions, are limited by technical infrastructure and human resources to effectively integrate climate and hazard information into the decision-making framework to manage risks across timescales.
Design and discovery process for co-production of DSS
RIMES’s user-centric bottom-up approach to designing DSS puts the users’ needs at the core, guiding the entire development process as follows:
- Institutional mechanisms like climate outlook forums and sectoral user-engagement help identify service gaps, user needs, and priorities
- Baseline assessment helps identify current capacity, technologies and system
- Technical Working Group with NMHSs, experts, and sectoral stakeholders; Focus Group Discussions and Key Informant Interview to understand user decision context, opportunities and barriers and receive inputs/feedback from users
- Co-production Workshop in collaboration with NMHSs, community leaders and sectoral stakeholders
- Development of DSS Framework and testing of prototype system customized to the decision context
- Co-refining using user-feedback
