School infrastructure is crucial for providing quality education. However, natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and landslides can damage school facilities. In addition, developing countries often face infrastructure challenges like inadequate classrooms, poor lighting, and insufficient ventilation. To tackle these challenges, COPA and CIMOC researchers together with researchers from UCL’s UNESCO Chair in Disaster Risk Reduction and Resilience Engineering have recently published three papers on this topic to address these issues on a large scale.

The first paper, "Towards Disaster Risk Mitigation on Large-Scale School Intervention Programs", proposes a data-driven methodology for prioritizing interventions to reduce seismic disaster risks in schools. The method uses a clustering algorithm to group similar buildings based on a seismic taxonomy and designs scalable interventions applicable to the entire cluster. You can access the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2023.103655

The second paper, "A Decision-Making Framework for School Infrastructure Improvement Programs", proposes a decision-making framework for prioritizing school infrastructure investments in safety and functionality with limited budgets. It uses clustering procedures, a multi-criteria utility function, and an optimization component to improve school infrastructure holistically. You can learn more about the framework here: https://doi.org/10.1080/15732479.2023.2199361

The third, and most recent, publication titled "Large-Scale School Building Infrastructure Improvement: The Case of the City of Cali, Colombia" presents an extension of the decision-making framework. This extended framework can be used in the early stages of formulating school-building improvement programs. The paper is implemented as a case study of public school infrastructure in the city of Cali, Colombia. The method helps define the need for improvement and the budget required to implement a large-scale intervention program for different decision-maker profiles. The paper can be accessed via the following link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.seps.2024.101881

According to the authors, this research is significantly relevant because it provides robust methodologies to support decision-making for school infrastructure improvement. This approach optimizes investments, improves infrastructure quality, adds transparency, and can reduce corruption by standardizing the allocation process. Additionally, the proposed methods are easily adaptable to different countries, levels of information quality and quantity, and even other types of infrastructure, making it ideal to be applicable in different contexts.