ICT in disaster management context: a descriptive and critical review

Disasters cause catastrophic events that lead to fatalities, damage, and social disturbance. Hydrological and meteorological disasters have an enormous impact worldwide. The impact of IT (Information Technology) in managing these disasters has been neglected. This study is intended to reveal the worldwide research status of hydro-meteorological disasters and various ITs in hazard management through a descriptive and critical review of existing literature. The bibliographic data is collected from Scopus and PATSTAT from 2010 to 2019. This study provides a basic framework for data acquisition, literature selection, and analysis of published documents. A descriptive review of selected literature is conducted to reveal the growth of publications w.r.t. year-wise reported hazards, citation analysis of published documents, patent analysis, geographical status of different hazards research, most influential journals, institutions, and documents. Further, critical review is conducted to analyze the environmental issues, recent developments in ICT-based disaster management, resilience concerns, key research areas, and challenges to implement ICT in disaster management. The present analysis depicts the importance of information technology in disaster management and offers guidance for future disaster management work supported by IT.