Climate change is increasing the risk of extreme weather events all over the world. Often it is not those responsible for greenhouse emissions who suffer the worst consequences. Island nations, cities, and communities run the risk of devastation from natural disasters, and the governing bodies behind these need to be resilient to disasters to rebuild quickly and save lives.

The open-source Critical Asset Management System (CAMS) project is a collaborative tool being developed through a voluntary effort led by ARISE-US, a private-sector advisory group to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), and TerminusDB.

If you’re looking for an open-source project to contribute to, please consider CAMS. The project includes:

• Technology for good
• Graph database technology
• Document database technology
• Schema design
• Front-end development
• Back-end development
• Collaborating with a range of people from different technology backgrounds.
• Community building
• Project growth and management

While many cities, communities, and islands seek to improve their disaster resilience by identifying their critical assets, their efforts often suffer from disparate datasets and the inability to map relationships and dependencies between assets in a programmatic way.. CAMS is a simple, free software tool that:

• Enables cities and islands to fully inventory their critical assets and assemble key data about them;
• Identifies the risks to which each asset is exposed;
• Maps the relationships between assets, both spatial and dependency-based;
• Helps to identify potential “failure chains” between them and the risks involved;
• Provides this output to other tools – emergency control room systems for example, or risk analysis tools.

The tool will provide a baseline level of functionality to allow progressive, innovative communities and nations to improve their resilience and ultimately save lives.