Geographic Information Systems

How GIS Can Impact Humanitarian Emergency Management Strategies

By Jaime Martinez

Throughout history and into current times, humanitarian emergencies — civil wars, famine, natural disasters, and other catastrophes — have devastated parts of the developed and developing worlds. The 2003 earthquake in Bam, Iran resulted in 30,000 casualties, and in 2004, over 20,000 lives were lost in the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster. In the United States, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed infrastructure, claimed the lives of thousands, and displaced hundreds of thousands in 2006. The level of devastation in these and other areas has been impacted by such physical factors as time, location, geographic accessibility, and resources, and by political, economic, and social stability. These factors can impact the number of lives saved, the effectiveness and efficiency of assistance, and the ability to prevent recurrence.

The United Nations (UN) and the non-governmental organization (NGO) community continue to develop innovative methods to manage emergencies more effectively. Agencies such as the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Mine Action Service, Save the Children, and Doctors Without Borders are working in crisis zones to ameliorate existing circumstances and deal with new crises as they arise. Management of humanitarian crises requires quick, decisive, and educated leadership, and these organizations are increasingly looking to emerging technologies to provide the information needed for effective crisis management.

This article will demonstrate how the use of a particular emerging technology, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), is assisting in the management of crisis. Using examples based on current crisis situations, I will focus on three applications of GIS: landmine and minefield management, refugee camp management, and post-crisis analysis. GIS has been used in each of these areas to help leaders make informed decisions and save lives.

What is GIS?

City census poverty data layered over a
map of Jefferson County, New Orleans, with a center line
of the Mississippi River for use in proximity analysis.

GIS is software that stores information about locations and displays the data on a computer screen in the form of a map. The information can then be statistically and geographically analyzed, to provide, for example, physical information about a country’s ratio of water to dry ground or how much land lies within a mile of a specific body of water.

Additional information may be included with the basic data, providing a more complete view for further analysis. For example, GIS data could be used to determine which bodies of water represent vernal pools (water bodies that dry up in the summer), contain water that is unsuitable to drink, or are moving bodies with a particular level of water flow. Since GIS combines a database with an easy-to-understand map for displaying the information it stores, it can help individuals understand a situation and make more efficient, educated decisions.

A Hypothetical Example

To better illustrate how GIS can function, consider hypothetical Country X, an underdeveloped nation in which over 60 percent of the population live in remote rural villages. Country X is located in the Sahel with a semi-arid climate and a monsoon season; hence, food and water shortages frequently occur. Several years of civil and tribal warfare have exacerbated the tenuous situation and virtually guarantee that the central government would be incapacitated during an emergency situation.

Humanitarian aid organizations have stepped in to offer aid in areas ranging from refugee and IDP (internally displaced persons) camp management to food, water, and medical needs. These organizations have gained extensive knowledge about their areas of work and have created a GIS to store and share this information. The GIS contains information about the location, size, and surface area of all water bodies and water features in the country, as well as useful detailed topographical information, including high and low elevation locations, key geographic features, roads, and travel routes. Also stored in the GIS is location information for all cities, towns, and villages, their populations, and demographic information such as tribal affiliations, populations by age group, and community health status.

High tide water level and city census poverty data,
layered over a map of Jefferson County, New Orleans.

Using the GIS, aid organizations can perform detailed analysis to make decisions during humanitarian emergencies. If Country X were to experience a drought during the growing season, 90% of that season’s crops would die, causing famine. Knowing this, organizations can bring food and water to the villagers to mitigate the famine’s impact. However, resources in the more remote villages would be completely depleted, forcing the inhabitants to move to a nearby large town or city to find food. Using the GIS, aid organizations can identify which villages are located near extremely low water tables and would likely be especially devastated by the drought; therefore, they would know before arriving that the majority of these communities would have moved on to seek food. Program administrators can consult demographic information in the GIS before arrival to determine that the villagers would have moved to a town located 100 miles away instead of a closer one, because the nearer town is comprises a hostile tribe, while the latter town’s population consists mainly of a tribe with family ties to them.

Because of the central government’s lack of investment, few paved roads exist in our hypothetical Country X; however, a well-known trade route links the town and the village. The GIS contains partial data for the route, but because the route is understood to exist between two mountainous areas, the aid organizations can determine their path to the town and arrange in advance the delivery of aid for the population, which increased from 10,000 to 50,000 inhabitants at the onset of the famine. Without the information provided by the GIS, managing the famine would have been more complicated and greater competition would exist among the refugees for quickly diminishing supplies, likely increasing the death toll.

As you can see from this hypothetical example, using a GIS could make crisis managers better able to assess situations on the ground and choose appropriate solutions. In humanitarian emergencies, the victims’ lives depend directly on the managers’ ability to make good decisions, and inefficient decisions can cause further complications at best — and disaster at worst. A GIS could be a critical element in enabling accurate assumptions and efficient decision-making.

Three possible applications of GIS use to humanitarian emergencies are landmine clearance and management, refugee camp management, and crisis security conditions analysis.

Clearing Landmines and Managing Minefields

“The landmine is eternally prepared to take victims. It is the perfect soldier.”¹

In conflict and war situations, conditions can induce the mass exodus of refugees. Armed invaders can force the displacement of populations directly, through attacks, or indirectly, by cutting off inhabitant’s supply lines. As the population leaves, the military moves in and secures the area; as they strengthen their occupation, the area’s strategic value increases, and landmines are often put in place to protect it.

Unfortunately, once a conflict is over, landmines are typically left in place, leaving a dangerous scar of war for the returning refugees. As refugees return home, they quickly find — sometimes at the cost of their life — that the roads they once used and the fields they once farmed are no longer accessible. Landmines, explosive remnants of war (ERW) and other types of unexploded ordinance (UXO) remain as a reminder of the conflict and inhibit future economic growth long after the war ends. Many types of landmines and UXO retain the ability to kill and maim for decades.

Furthermore, landmines are cheap to build but expensive to deactivate, costing between $3 and $27 to produce but more than $1,000 to remove.² Because UXO impedes economic rehabilitation, it also threatens political stability, particularly in areas with large numbers of returning refugees.

Hydrology and city census poverty information layered
over a map of Jefferson County, New Orleans.
This type of view can provide an understanding
of the regional issues involved.

Currently, there are many organizations working to remove landmines in different countries, with the largest operations working in affiliation with the UN Mine Action Service. For instance, Afghanistan currently has the world’s largest mine action program (Mine Action Program of Afghanistan — MAPA). At the peak of operations, the program employed as many as 10,000 people in all areas of mine action. The situation in Afghanistan continues to improve since the country signed the anti-personnel mine ban treaty in 2003. Unfortunately, the situation is still critical, as of 2006, 17% of the population still lived in mine-contaminated areas. Furthermore, an average of 62 Afghans were being killed each month by landmines; a majority of these casualties were male and half were children. The nation’s situation is still stark and requires an immense amount of continued work.³

Tremendous numbers of landmines were laid in Bosnia during the Bosnian war in 1992 through 1996, and 3.68 percent of the territory in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2006 was still afflicted — over a decade later. More than 14,000 locations still needed to be cleared, and there were 34 mine-related victims (death or injury). As in Afghanistan, the Bosnian landmine crisis poses a major barrier to returning refugees, internally displaced persons, and economic recovery.⁴

Current methods of clearing landmines are slow, so GIS has been useful in improving landmine strategy and creating innovative protection methods and data collection devices, and has become a key element in information management systems for mine action.

In 1990, the Geneva International Center for Humanitarian Demining deployed the Information Management System for Mine Action (IMSMA). This geospatial tool was created to help “manage, report and map mine UXO and other ERW”⁵ using known landmine location data along with information gathered in the field. IMSMA integrates population distribution, density, and aggregate numbers (usually from estimates provided by the Global Population Database or the Gridded Population of the World) to help mine action organizations make real-time assessments of demining needs in the critical period immediately following a conflict.⁶ In the long term, organizations can also use IMSMA to decide where to focus demining efforts in the country — particularly useful when funding decreases. IMSMA is currently being used in over 80% of all mine action programs around the world.⁷ Other systems, such as PARADIS, are being developed to make it easier to use GIS for demining.

Also under development is the Handheld Landmine Avoidance System called “Mine Alert”.⁸ With this system, miniaturized GPS receivers are installed into wristwatches for local villagers to wear. Each watch contains a GIS that “knows” the location of local landmine fields. Through GPS, the watch alerts the wearer with an extremely loud sound if he or she nears a landmine field. This would be particularly useful where signage or fencing around a field is in disrepair and for children (half of all landmine victims) who are more effectively deterred from landmine fields by a noise than a sign.

Refugee Camp Management

Conflict often results in the movement of peoples from the affected area to a new location. As the numbers of migrants increase, refugee camps are set up as temporary housing. For instance, after the 1994 civil war and genocide in Rwanda, more than 2 million Hutus, fearing repercussions, escaped the country to refugee camps in the neighboring nations of Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zaire.

The aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami disaster is a more recent example of large-scale displacement. With homes, businesses and crops devastated, millions were forced to move to undamaged higher ground, and many ended up in refugee camps.

In these and other emergency situations, entire populations are displaced and forced to settle in makeshift camps, often with no running water, unsanitary conditions, and no access to basic health care. The average refugee arrives with only what they could carry, resulting in large groups of vulnerable, hungry, thirsty and tired people. It is imperative that “a rapid estimate of the size of the displaced population [be made to provide] essential information with which to plan relief activities”.⁹ Aid organizations also require ongoing, accurate data about the changing ground situation.

Satellite imagery can fulfill these needs for regular updates during crisis situations.¹⁰ Today’s satellite imagery is called Very High Resolution Satellite (VHRS) imagery. These satellites are equipped with multi-spectral telescopic cameras, which are used to “do rapid population estimates of refugee camps.”¹¹ Furthermore, VHRS imagery, in which every pixel represents an area measuring less than a meter, enables a viewer to identify man-made structures such as buildings and vehicles.¹² Aid workers must know where these structures are for refugee camp management. Because the identification process is labor-intensive and time-consuming, satellite imagery analysis is being streamlined using GIS. Currently, the process is being automated using an object-oriented approach to structure identification. Because all satellite imagery is raster data (a pixelated form of image data, such as a JPEG or PNG), every physical feature in the image is represented by a group of pixels. A car may be 6 pixels, while a truck is 12, and a tent is 40.

A GIS uses computer algorithms to rapidly and accurately identify and display existing conditions as an aid in better-informed camp planning, according to a study at the UN High Commission for Refugees Lukole refugee camp in Tanzania¹³, where emergency managers analyze the location and size of tents for a quick population estimate. Furthermore, roadway identification facilitates greater traffic control policies and can inform growth patterns of the camps and security strategies. Also, camps are often set up before a formal agreement or Memorandum of Understanding is finalized, and this technology facilitates a camp management plan and strategy that minimizes the negative impact of the camp on the host community.¹⁴

Vegetation assessment and change detection in refugee camp situations can also use VHSR multispectral satellite imagery to enable better-informed decisions for the camp’s growth.¹⁵ For instance, it can help distinguish flat, forested areas that can be cleared for land and building materials from hilly or wet areas that do not offer sufficient usable land or material for camp growth.¹⁶

Crisis Security Conditions Analysis

Humanitarian organizations often must administer aid programs in situations that place workers in harm’s way. Political instability and civil strife can put aid workers at odds with one or another side of the conflict. In a civil war, providing food or medical supplies to the “other side” may be viewed as aiding the enemy.

This satellite image, layered over a map of Jefferson County,
New Orleans, gives a clear view of the large numbers of
bodies of water in the area, which can provide important
information about possible problems to aid workers.

The perceived distinction between an invading army and aid workers may also become blurred, placing the aid workers in greater danger. During the war in Afghanistan, for example, US troops administered leaflets to the population warning that future aid shipments would be withheld if the communities did not cooperate in the identification of insurgents.¹⁷ These actions contributed to a perception among the local population that all aid organizations were working for the US military, ultimately leading insurgents to target these organizations. In June 2004, after twenty-four years in Afghanistan, five members of the Doctors Without Borders staff members were killed in the climax of a steadily deteriorating security situation, and the organization was forced to leave in order to safeguard their workers.

Because security is so important, it is critical that humanitarian crisis managers have a complete understanding of the situation on the ground to ensure the safety of their staff members, and “[the] use of GIS methods for resource allocation, planning, and logistics has become a standard component in major [humanitarian emergency operations].”¹⁸ A 2005 study used publicly available data to create a standardized, geospatially-linked information database for Iraq that provided humanitarian organizations with access to an “on the ground” picture of conditions and their relationship to humanitarian efforts.¹⁹ Fighting and attacks on aid workers were tracked, as were general security and infrastructure conditions in the different regions. This information was then added to the GIS and used by humanitarian organizations to study changing conditions, particularly to infrastructure reconstruction and security.

The database is continually updated to keep up with the changing status on the ground, and the mapping function allows conditions to be viewed at a specific moment and as they change over time, enabling managers to make stronger assumptions about future conditions using trend analyses. Future GIS technology could identify areas within conflict zones that are most likely to produce refugee outflows or become refugee destinations. It could also map areas for site planning by reviewing information regarding environmental conditions, transport routes, habitable land, water, food, and fuel, as well as identifying areas of fighting and the status of security problems throughout the country.²⁰

Conclusion

The decisions that humanitarian organizations make in emergency situations about where to send food, what roads to use, and how to deal with affected populations can mean life or death to endangered people groups. Poor decisions can and often do mean that more people will die during a crisis. Aid organizations work with populations at their most vulnerable. In order to do their job properly, aid workers must have a full understanding of the situation on the ground, how it has developed, and how it will continue to develop.

This is where a technology like GIS can help greatly, and I believe GIS should be made an integral part of humanitarian aid and crisis management. GIS empowers people to combine all of the knowledge available about an area and use it to make better decisions.

GIS can organize information, turn abstract knowledge about a situation into an easily understood, straightforward map and enable rapid and informed decisions. These maps can further explain the circumstances and plans to local leaders, assisting in the critical task of involving the affected community in the aid process. When used properly during humanitarian emergencies, GIS can become a decision maker’s powerful resource and help ensure that the greatest number of lives are saved.

Footnotes

1. Jody Williams, founding coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, in her Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech on December 10, 1997 at Oslo City Hall, Oslo, Norway.
2. Canadian Landmine Foundation website, “The Problem of Landmines - History”. http://www.canadianlandmine.org/landmineProb_History.cfm
3. All information about the Afghanistan Mine Action Service program provided in this paragraph is taken from the United Nations Mine Service website, E-Mine Electronic Mine Information Network: Afghanistan (Islamic Republic of): Summary. http://www.mineaction.org/country.asl?c=1
4. All information in this paragraph is taken from the E-Mine Electronic Mine Information Network: Bosnia and Herzegovina: Summary. http://www.mineaction.org/country.asp?c=4
5. GICHD: Frequently Asked Questions. Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining. http://www.gichd.org/operational-assistance-research/information-management/imsma/overview/
6. GICHD Fact Sheet for Mine Action. Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining. May 2007. http://www.gichd.org/fileadmin/pdf/IMSMA/fact-sheets/FactSheet1-Population-at-risk-May2007.pdf
7. Ibid.
8. Cornfield, T., et. al. Handheld landmine avoidance. Department of Computing and Information Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada
9. Grais, Rebecca, et. al. “Are rapid population estimates accurate? A field trial of two different assessment methods.” Disasters, 2006, 30(3): 364-376 Blackwell Publishing, Maiden, MA
10. Bjorgo, Einar. “Using very high spatial resolution multispectral satellite sensor imagery to monitor refugee camps”. Int. J. Remote Sensing, 2000 Volume 2, No. 3, 61-616
11. Giada, S. et. al. “Information extraction from very high-resolution satellite imagery over Lukole refugee camp, Tanzania”. Int J. Remote Sensing, 2003 Volume 24, No. 22, 4251-5266
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. From “Camp Management Toolkit”, available at http://www.nrc.no/
15. Bjorgo, Einar. “Using very high spatial resolution multispectral satellite sensor imagery to monitor refugee camps”. Int. J. Remote Sensing, 2000 Volume 2, No. 3, 61-616
16. Ibid.
17. “Afghanistan: Doctors Without Borders pulls out of war-torn country”. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on 8/25/07. http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2004/07/099fbfl8-6af2-47b7-a318-a5c8155b132d.html
18. Kaiser, Reinhard et. al. “The application of geographic information systems and global positioning systems in humanitarian emergencies: Lessons learned, programme implications and future research”. Disaster 2003, 27(2):127-140. Overseas Development Institute.
19. Mubareka, Sarah et. al. “Standardizing and mapping open-source information for crisis regions: the case of post-conflict Iraq”. Disaster 2005, 29 (3):237-254. Overseas Development Institute.
20. Ibid.

GIS at NYU

ArcGIS, ArcView, ArcIMS, and other ESRI products comprise the premier suite of Geographic Information System (GIS) tools used for research and instruction at NYU. ITS has upgraded the NYU site license for this software, providing many useful features for faculty members who wish to use the software with their classes.

The ESRI mapping software has a wide range of uses in teaching and research involving spatial data. For example, ESRI products have been used at NYU to build an inventory of artifacts and ancient structures at an archaological dig in Turkey and to study the relationship of lung disease to dwelling locations in the Bronx. (See a prior Connect article for details.)

Under a recently upgraded license for these ESRI tools, NYU faculty and researchers may obtain free one-year licenses for ArcGIS. This provides useful features for faculty considering the use of GIS software in their classes.

ArcGIS, ArcView, and many other ESRI tools, such as Spatial Analyst and 3D Analyst, continue to be available at ITS computer labs and classrooms under the NYU site license.

For more information on these products and the upgraded NYU site license, attend a GIS clinic, held each Tuesday at 1:00 pm in the ITS Data Services Statistics & Mapping Lab at 75 Third Avenue, email data.services@nyu.edu, or visit http://www.nyu.edu/its/gis.