The UNDP Country Office in the Solomon Islands is implementing a range of projects in support of Sustainable Development Goals and the National Development Strategy 2020- 2035 one of which is related to Disaster Risk Management.   Disaster Risk Management cuts across almost every Sustainable Development Goals particularly goals number 1, 11 and 13. UNDP’s project on Integrated Approach to Disaster Risk Management in Solomon Islands supports Strategic Goal Number Four of the NDS which calls for environmentally sustainable with effective disaster risk management, response and recovery.

UNDP is embarking on two-year project in partnership with the Ministry of Environment Climate Change Disaster Management and Meteorology to have an integrated approach to addressing disaster management and disaster risk reduction.   The DRM Project’s overall goal focuses on having increased national capacity to anticipate hazards, withstand the impacts, recover from, and better inform development as well as reducing risks associated with human and natural hazards to sustain development gains. The project has three main outputs which consist of the following:

1. institutional capacity development, coordination, planning and policy advisory support to consolidate the establishment of a robust and resilient Solomon Islands disaster risk management system that also considers climate change and sustainable development.
2. scale up of support to strengthening sub- national governance and operational arrangements to enhance community resilience.
3. strengthening of linkages between climate and disaster risk reduction and sustainable development through better information and knowledge management system for planning and decision- making.

The focus of this consultancy is linked to Output three which aims to build a robust information and knowledge management for decision making. This output aims to address the following issues:

• Widely scattered data and information for decision- making in Disaster Risk Reduction and Disaster Management amongst agencies dealing with different hazards, N-DC Sector Committees, NGOs, and Provinces.
• Information about hazards events, exposure, vulnerability and the impacts of disasters are not systematically collected and stored.
• Different methodologies and tools are used for disaster risk information
• Agreed standards for baseline data or structured metadata are lacking.
• Limited analysis is done to understand the trends, spatial and temporal of potential risks and their impacts.
• Disaster risk information is not systematically used for policy and decision- making in disaster risk management.
• Dedicated capacity and skill development in information and knowledge management are lacking as well as communication.

The purpose of this assignment is to provide technical support to the DRM project in the establishment and implementation of an information and knowledge management system for DRR and DM to address various aspects of the issues mentioned above. This assignment is complementary to the work of UNITAR’s Commonsensing project on enabling policy makers to have access to Earth Observation Data.

Considering the above, the project seeks an experienced national Information and Knowledge Management consultant who can work with the NDMO, the project team and the stakeholders defined under the disaster management plan to achieve the objectives of the project.