By Jude Njoku

Worried by the devastating consequences of natural disasters and their impacts on lives, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, IFRC, (a member of the UN- Habitat-coordinated Global Network on Sustainable Housing) and the Building Research Establishment, BRE have developed a tool that would deliver sustainable guidance and provide a method of assessing such disasters whenever they occur.

The web-based tool called QSAND, (Quantifying Sustainability in the Aftermath of Natural Disasters), according to a report in UN-Habitat’s website, “is a comprehensive built-environment tool covering shelter, settlements, infrastructure and so on”. Organized into eight categories, QSAND will be used by field-based managers of relief and re-construction activities, desk-based managers of programmes and authorities, donors, financial institutions and policy analysts.

Speaking on what led his group to partner with BRE in the development of the tool, IFRC’s Head of Shelters and Settlements, Graham Saunders said, “One of the challenges we face in the humanitarian sector is that along with the desire to meet the immediate needs of disaster-affected communities, we must also think longer term from day one on-wards and ensure that our response to the disaster is sustainable, leading to resilient communities.”

In 2010, IFRC approached BRE to assist in preparing the tool. The aim was to draw on BRE’s experience of developing the widely-used, internationally-respected Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Methodology for enhancing, assessing and rating sustainability in construction covering master planning, buildings and infrastructure.

For the development of the tool, IFRC and BRE collaborated closely with UN-Habitat and a select number of other key stakeholders, as members of the project consultation group.

According to BRE’s Programme Manager, Yetunde Abdul their aim of working with IFRC is “to develop and make the QSAND tool freely available to all”.

Innovation and communication

“This is very much in line with the BRE Trust’s aims to advance knowledge, innovation and communication in the built environment to help meet our goal of ‘building a better world together,” Abdul explained.

A unique feature of QSAND is its ability to give the user an overall performance score at the end of the process. This will help governments, humanitarian agencies and donors to understand the impacts of their work in disaster zones, pinpoint which strategies are the most effective and establish benchmarks of sustainability success.

“A number of humanitarian and other organisations have expressed an interest in applying QSAND. We will be supporting them and others who apply the tool providing technical and operation support to maximize the short, medium and long term benefits available to affected communities,”the BRE Programme Manager said.