Identifying critical factors to enhance SDI performance for facilitating disaster risk management in small island developing states

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are highly exposed to disaster risk events that frequently overwhelm their capacity to generate and share spatial information to reduce human-economic losses. The Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) has been widely implemented to support information sharing and management in different domains. In this paper, we aim to identify critical factors to enhance SDI performance to facilitate Disaster Risk Management (DRM) in SIDS. We make use of a three-round Delphi survey and Kendall W coefficient to assess consensus among 28 key international experts in SDI, surveying and DRM. Our results illustrate strong experts' consensus on identifying a list of 23 most critical factors. We found that people and policy factors matter the most. The insights reported here would assist decision-makers to design roadmaps to enhance sharing of spatial knowledge to build more resilient SIDS and to support their achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.