The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction listed 10 reasons businesses should reduce their disaster exposure, including risk factoring, which cannot be achieved without historical data about hazards, their locations, magnitudes, and frequencies. Substantial hazard data are reported by newspapers, which could add value to disaster management decision making. In this study, a text-mining program extracted keywords related to floods’ geographic location, date, and damages from newspaper analyses of flash floods in Fujairah, UAE, from 2000–2018. The paper describes extracting such information as well as geocoding and validating flood-prone areas generated through geographic information system (GIS) modeling. The generation of flood-prone areas was based on elevation, slope, land use, soil, and geology coupled with topographic wetness index, topographic position index, and curve number. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) produced relative weight for each factor, and GIS map algebra generated flood-prone areas. AHP inclusion helped minimize weight subjectivity among various experts. Of all areas, 85% are considered medium and low flood-prone zones, mainly mountainous areas. However, the 15% that are high/very high are dominated by urban areas in low coastal plains, predisposing them to flash floods. Eighty-four percent of flood events reported by newspapers were in areas rated as high/very high flood-prone zones. In the absence of flood records, newspapers reports can be used as a reference. Policymakers should assess whether flood-prone area models offer accurate analyses. These findings are useful for organizations related to disaster management, urban planning, insurance, archiving, and documentation.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the specific meanings underlying the general antecedents of organisational innovativeness (OI) in one specific public sector context, to fill empirically the categories employed in prior quantitative research and to understand better some of the opportunities for strengthening facilitators of OI and overcoming barriers to OI that present themselves in particular contexts. Design/methodology/approach This research is based on a field study. It uses 29 semi-structured interviews with the members of UAE government and semi-government organisations. The research methodology is qualitative: it seeks to elucidate the meanings that structure the respondents’ understandings of innovation at work. Findings Across the UAE public sector there are great differences in organisational members’ interest in, and readiness to engage with, OI. Members of the public sector tended to conceptualise OI as a set of individual efforts and relationships in which the trust with superiors played a key role, as did the availability of individual rewards. For some respondents communication served as an umbrella term to denote organisational characteristics that would enable individuals to join efforts to make the public sector more innovative. Overall, the great variations in respondents’ ability to articulate and conceptualise the antecedents of OI suggests that organisational capabilities to support OI need strengthening. Research limitations/implications The paper’s insights are based on the study of the public sector of only one country and may be difficult to generalise to other countries. Practical implications The paper suggests ways in which Emirati public sector organisations can strengthen the facilitators of OI and overcome the obstacles presented by the barriers to OI in order to help public sector leaders and employees make innovation a routine element of their day-to-day work. Originality/value The paper presents a first attempt at using qualitative research to deepen our understanding of the antecedents of organisational innovativeness in the public sector.
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