GIS for Humanitarians

© Sidney Tupper 2008

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Contents

1: Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1

1.1 Purpose of paper ................................................................................ 1

1.2 What is GIS? ...................................................................................... 1

1.3 Humanitarian context .......................................................................... 2

1.4 Policy basis ......................................................................................... 3

1.5 Motivation for GIS applications ........................................................... 3

2: Literature Review ............................................................................................ 4

2.1 General ............................................................................................... 4

2.1.1 Transport planning .......................................................................... 5

2.1.2 Relief inventory management .......................................................... 5

2.1.3 Records management ..................................................................... 5

2.1.4 NGO capacity assessment .............................................................. 6

2.1.5 Informing donors and media ............................................................ 6

2.1.6 Coordination of diverse actors ......................................................... 6

2.2 Complex emergencies ........................................................................ 7

2.2.1 Analysis of conflict parameters ........................................................ 7

2.2.2 Population displacement ................................................................. 7

2.2.3 Demining ......................................................................................... 8

2.3 Disaster management ......................................................................... 8

2.3.1 Risk reduction ................................................................................. 9

2.3.2 Emergency response .................................................................... 10

3: Conclusions .................................................................................................. 11

3.1 Improving GIS ................................................................................... 11

3.1.1 Data standardization ..................................................................... 11

3.1.2 Clean datasets .............................................................................. 11

3.1.3 Simple user interfaces ................................................................... 12

3.1.4 Intellectual property ....................................................................... 12

3.1.5 Bandwidth for global data sharing ................................................. 12

3.2 Research areas ................................................................................ 12

3.3 Concluding remarks .......................................................................... 13

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1: INTRODUCTION

Humanitarian action is deeply problematical. At any given moment, millions of people around the globe are enduring hardship that threatens their lives. Situation intelligence, political will, organizational capability, inter-agency coordination mechanisms and financial resources limit the capacity of host governments and developed nations to come to their aid.

1.1 Purpose of paper

This paper discusses actual and potential means to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to strengthen systemic weaknesses in the planning and execution of humanitarian operations. It reviews the literature to describe the state of the art of GIS in the domain, outlines potential applications and suggests research areas.

1.2 What is GIS?

GIS is a convergence of database, digital mapping, remote sensing and network technologies that enables spatial representation of information. GIS tools associate dataset elements with map elements and provide user interfaces which facilitate manipulation, presentation and analysis of spatial and parametric data.

The utility of GIS can be understood by example. Vector maps are database structures which represent map elements with points, lines and polygons. A point locates the centre of a place, building or indeed any object. A line of two or more points describes a linear feature like a road or a watercourse. A polygon of three or more points outlines an area that corresponds to, for example, a lake, an island or a country. Together these geometric shapes constitute a map in which the locations of the elements are definite, and which GIS software can display. The same or a connected database contains parametric data associated with the particular geometric shapes of the map which provides information about them, such as their place-names and other characteristics of their nature. The example illustrated by Figure 1 shows how an analyst might predict flood vulnerability by overlaying a set of shapes that represent elements of an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp, such as boundaries, populated areas, roads, latrines and tube wells, with polygons that represent contour lines. By displaying camp elements and tinting areas below a given elevation, the analyst can predict the effects of flooding of a given severity and recommend appropriate action.

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Figure 1 Flood extent prediction in ZamZam IDP camp, Darfur

1.3 Humanitarian context

Many of the problems of humanitarian action are inherent well before an emergency. International response to the plight of populations imperilled by natural disasters and complex emergencies is slow and insufficient at the best of times, and sometimes does not materialize at all. Latencies in mobilization, from the time of germination of the seeds of crisis through recognition of the emergency, to commencement of action on the ground, accumulate to delay response. A humanitarian organization’s imperfect awareness of need and its limited logistical and financial resources weaken its capacity to respond.

Once humanitarian action is under way, the context on the ground is fraught with logistical obstacles. Situations are typically chaotic, dynamic, difficult to predict and dangerous. Locations are often remote, environmentally hostile, and conflicted to degrees ranging from lawlessness to outright war. Infrastructure is poor or non-existent: shelter, water, food, cooking-fuel, sanitation and communication are inadequate. Where many autonomous actors are present, they inadequately coordinate their operations, providing redundant services and leaving large gaps in the total response to the emergency. International actors seldom have sufficient local knowledge to apply their resources to best effect. Liaison for local support is difficult to establish with local coordinating authorities.

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1.4 Policy basis

Inadequate information and coordination are common elements of humanitarian action problems, which have their roots in conditions that prevail long before the onset of emergencies. The obligation of states to act on their “responsibility to protect”1 (R2P) includes a specific requirement to prevent situations that might become humanitarian crises. This principle has the ancient sense that “a stitch in time saves nine”, in resources and lives. But prevention depends on situational awareness for early warning, planning and action, which in turn depends on information. Similarly the R2P Doctrine for Human Protection Operations (“There must be maximum coordination between military and civilian authorities and organizations.”2) implies that information is central to achievement of human security objectives in planning and operations for collaborative humanitarian action.

Improving information flows can play a key role in reducing suffering in complex emergencies.3

Technology is an essential enabling mechanism of information collection, processing and propagation. The vast quantity of information available is useless without means to filter out irrelevant, wrong and stale material, notice missing pieces, find them, fit together a model of reality that has utility and present it to support decisions. Among other technology aids, GIS shows promise to provide those means.

1.5 Motivation for GIS applications

With its facility for making spatial and temporal sense of huge sets of facts, GIS can improve the understandability of information by casting it in forms that reveal patterns and trends to support decisions and convince decision-makers better than the raw data can. Its graphical nature, flexibility, interactivity and internet-readiness harmonize with the digital work-modes of technocratic policy-makers in offices and board-rooms and humanitarian aid workers in the field.

The flood vulnerability example in Figure 1 suggests just one of many practical GIS applications. In general, the technology serves analysis, planning, data visualization, coordination and communication4, information sharing5 and other purposes for which spatial and temporal relationships of data are important.

1 The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State

Sovereignty. International Development Research Centre. 2001 2 Improved coordination and collaboration between military forces, political civilian authorities,

and humanitarian agencies will likely continue to be an issue of particular significance. Ibid. 3 David Keen, Complex Emergencies. Polity Press, 2008

4 Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response. The SPHERE Project

2004 5 Carsten Völz. Humanitarian coordination in Indonesia: an NGO viewpoint. CARE International,

2005

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2: LITERATURE REVIEW

This section summarizes some of the discussion of GIS techniques in humanitarian activities. For the sake of structure it has subsections that distinguish applications for complex emergencies, which imply a protracted deterioration of human security mainly caused by conflict, and natural disasters, which are usually of more rapid onset and of environmental origin. A general subsection deals with applications that serve both.

2.1 General

Hoppen and Paulsen6 describe a general platform that could serve as a basis for the specialized applications that the following sections describe. It was a prototypical web-based GIS developed for the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the US State Department to support humanitarian operations in countries in in the Horn of Africa. It overlays data layers of population, topography, hydrology, land cover, refugee camps, airfields, transportation, and natural hazards in a common geographic reference system on Landsat imagery. The ESRI7 Arc-GIS software that implements it provides a human interface to manipulate the presentation of information that has become the de facto standard for GIS.

Kotsakis et al8 describe an architecture for mobile use of GIS with devices which integrate a small computing platform with a small but useful colour display and a variety of input modes including keyboard. It supports several major operating systems to run light GIS software, has a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver and connects to the internet in several modes including wireless telephony where cellular networks reach. All of its elements are commercially available, and the whole is robust, inexpensive and adaptable to many applications. Such devices are in wide use now (2007) by many humanitarian field operators for data collection, geo-positioning, communication, coordination and visualization. The demining procedure described by Delhay (2005) below is a typical application.

A National Science Foundation workshop9 found that a GIS approach is consistent with the following principles for humanitarian capacity development:

• action and decision-making occur at the lowest possible level

• direct action by humanitarian organizations and international agencies is replaced by capacity building, standards setting and monitoring

6 Stacy Hoppen and Robert T. Paulsen. A Humanitarian Relief GIS for East Africa. Earth Satellite

Corporation, Inc. 2001 7 ESRI is the preeminent supplier of GIS and mapping software.

8 Evangelos Kotsakis, Alain Caignault, Wolfram Woehler, Michalis Ketselidis. Integrating

Differential GPS data into an Embedded GIS and its Application to Infomobility and Navigation. Joint Research Centre. 2001

9 Workshop Debriefing: Information and Communication Systems in Humanitarian Action: Developing an Agenda for Active Interdisciplinary Research, University of Washington, 2006

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• the distinction between relief and development has disappeared, replaced by integrated stages of humanitarian action to build capacity and meet need

• collaboration among stakeholders is open, extensive and supported by effective, appropriate infrastructure and systems

• all programs and systems are socially, culturally and organizationally appropriate

• there is a scientific approach to the role of localized, indigenous knowledge

2.1.1 Transport planning

A. Boukhtouta et al10 propose military systems for Network Centric Operations that have application in humanitarian contexts. Access to stricken areas to provide relief may depend on dynamic local conditions of the sort that maps represent well. The states of roads, bridges, fords, railways, river navigability, air strips, port facilities and hostile forces are important considerations for transport planning. With this information a GIS can analyze optimality of transportation network paths and display recommended routes. Transport workers equipped with internet-accessible devices can consult the GIS and report changes in these states to update it.

2.1.2 Relief inventory management

In a study11 supervised by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the World Health Organization (WHO), the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition examined the effectiveness of aspects of response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, identified the lack of a relief supplies inventory management system, and recommended development of GIS-based approaches. Provision of relief materials commonly involves dynamic storage and distribution among many sites. In a prolonged campaign, a hierarchical network of warehouses has to be supplied with relief stock in a manner that maintains continuity of service to the beneficiaries. A distributed GIS application that gives visibility to the changing requirements for and real time storage levels of the various relief items at each node in the network would facilitate timely balancing of supply with demand.

2.1.3 Records management

Messick12 describes a GIS used by the United Nations Humanitarian Information Center (HIC) for records management in the coordination of health initiatives by international actors responding to the crisis in Iraq. The HIC Project attempts to clarify major issues and order chaotic and ad hoc data gathering exercises. Environmental challenges and political complexities oblige urgency characteristic of information efforts in all complex emergencies. For example, among many other layers, the GIS records the location and state of medical equipment, to support the efforts of organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.

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A. Boukhtouta, F. Bouak, J. Berger, A. Guitouni. Description and analysis of military

planning systems. Defence R&D Canada – Valcartier. February 2006 11

The role of needs assessment in the tsunami response. Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, 2006 12 Shawn Messick. Herding Cats: Supporting Humanitarian Information Requirements in Iraq. Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, Information Management and Mine Action Programs. 2003

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2.1.4 NGO capacity assessment

International actors depend heavily on local organizations to implement their objectives when responding to emergencies. The quality of selected Non-Government Organizations (NGO) is crucial to successful outcomes. NGOs fall in a spectrum that has criminal gangs and opportunistic money-sinks at one extreme and competent service organizations at the other. Effective contracting of local NGOs requires comprehensive knowledge of their capabilities, reliability and geographic range. A GIS is useful for maintaining records of NGO capacity and performance that some country offices of international aid agencies are beginning to use in their procurement processes. They find that it helps to motivate good NGO performance and development of capacity. For example, an agency like WHO queries a country database to short-list organizations capable of conducting a vaccination program in widely-distributed IDP camps. The use of a GIS in this manner is consistent with the principles outlined at the beginning of this section, in particular, that humanitarian action should merge seamlessly into development, and engage local actors.

2.1.5 Informing donors and media

The clarity of presentation of GIS products makes them useful for informing important stakeholders of the nature of often subtle issues. When the support of high-level bureaucrats with little time to grasp complexity is crucial to a favourable decision, a GIS is a useful tool for framing the situation concisely, precisely and convincingly. Its graphic nature is effective in public relations and advocacy, for media presentation13 and in local level capacity development activities. A picture is worth a thousand words.

2.1.6 Coordination of diverse actors

Verjee14 concludes that GIS-based analysis can have a decisive impact on coordination of humanitarian assistance. GIS can offer substantial utility beyond its cartographic applications, particularly for site selection, geo-visualization, cluster analysis and range analysis. This does not necessarily demonstrate the feasibility of GIS-based analysis. In his view, further research and real-life exercise of these techniques is necessary.

Maintaining a real time situational picture available to all actors should be a key objective for coordination of emergency action. The typical diversity and autonomy of humanitarian organizations at a crisis location precludes overall direction of activities in any comprehensive sense; instead establishing and sustaining a common awareness of situations, needs, hazards, who is doing what where, gaps and redundancies is the better strategy. In principle the parties will take informed intelligent action with the resources available to them, with reasonably optimal results. A GIS can facilitate this approach by offering the actors means to record situation reports, analysis, intentions and requests in a coherent spatial and temporal information framework that is accessible to everyone and presents graphical/textual views of its content that support good decisions.

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GIS Best Practices: GIS for Media, ESRI. February 2007 http://www.esri.com/library/bestpractices/media.pdf

14 Firoz Verjee. Doctoral dissertation: The Utility of GIS Analysis in Coordinating Humanitarian Assistance, George Washington University. October 2007

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2.2 Complex emergencies

The causes of conflict are a major source of puzzlement in the literature of complex emergencies. Understanding the roots of violence is an important step toward reducing its miserable outcomes. Of the many analytical approaches, quantitative examination of spatially related data is common. Regression analysis tests hypotheses for correlations in causes and effects that often have spatial characteristics. GIS provides the mathematical tools for these operations and high-quality graphical presentation of results, quickly and repeatably.

2.2.1 Analysis of conflict parameters

Hegre and Raleigh15 examine conditions of civil war, testing hypotheses for why larger countries have civil wars more frequently than small countries. They analyze Armed Conflict Location and Events Database (ACLED) data which codes the dates and exact locations of individual events within an interval of armed conflicts. They did not use GIS tools but could have, particularly for visualization.

Restrpo et al16 use the ESRI GIS tracking tool to conduct cluster analyses of conflicts in Colombia, showing that the central human security challenge there has three modes: massacres by right-wing paramilitaries in rural areas, massacres by left-wing guerrillas in rural areas, and guerrilla bombings in both the biggest urban areas and rural areas.

Gilmore et al17 explore relations between natural resources and the onset and duration of armed civil conflict. They discuss issues in the collection of conflict-relevant resource data and test them in a GIS with an Angola / Democratic Republic of Congo mapset overlaid with spatially and temporally identified layers of conflict events and diamond mining operations. They were encouraged by significant correlations that suggest that lootable natural resources in areas of insurgency lead to conflict but caution that researchers will have to overcome problems with data truth and model specification to get robust results.

2.2.2 Population displacement

Lischer18 contends that disaggregation of the violence that causes displacement and the characteristics of the resulting displacement crisis is necessary to understand the significance of conflict-induced displacement in international politics. She discusses typologies of conflict and displacement that would support such a study, which she regards as problematical because of the lack of reliable data about conflict locations, refugee/IDP numbers, flight reasons, violence types and characteristics of the crises. Political tensions surrounding refugee enumeration distort the data. GIS is useful to study problems like this one, which have strong spatial characteristics. Lischer

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Håvard Hegre, Clionadh Raleigh. Population Size, Concentration, and Civil War: a Geographically Disaggregated Database. Centre for the Study of Civil War, September 2006

16 Jorge A. Restrepo, Michael Spagat, Patrick Reanier and Nicolás F. Suárez. Civilian Casualties in the Colombian Conflict: Georeferencing Human Security. ESRI. December 2005

17 Elisabeth Gilmore, Nils Petter Gleditsch, PaIvi Lujala, Jan Ketil Rød. Conflict Diamonds: A New Dataset, Conflict Management and Peace Science, 22:257–272, 2005 18 Sarah Kenyon Lischer, Causes and Consequences of Conflict-Induced Displacement, Civil Wars, Volume 9, Issue 2 June 2007 , pages 142 - 155

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describes a technique that integrates a GPS receiver and a portable GIS computer with an electronic questionnaire to capture and locate survey data.

2.2.3 Demining

NATO and UN missions in Kosovo used GIS to track landmines and damage to villages as part of the repatriation plan for Kosovar refugees.

Delhay et al19 describes a set of GIS tools for supporting the removal of mines and unexploded ordinance (UXO), which threaten the lives and livelihoods of millions of people and have serious socio-economic effects due to loss of agricultural land and access to water. Since large mine/UXO-contaminated areas require significant time and resources to clear, demining activities must be managed efficiently. The PARADIS (Prototype for Assisting Rational Activities in Demining using Images from Satellites) GIS toolset supports conventional demining strategies and the roles of the campaign designer and the field operator. It uses satellite imagery and existing mapsets for its spatial reference frame. Its XML data structure facilitates interoperability with other systems, addressing the data reuse issue discussed in Section 3.1.1. PARADIS gives the central office means to plan field operations and integrate field observations in a geographical database that resolves area contamination status to the square meter. In the field, hand-held GPS-equipped computers running a light-weight GIS record the state of access roads to contaminated areas, delineate the boundaries of the work area and the minefield grid, and record the status of each cell in the grid (not worked on, ongoing, cleared). The operators upload the daily data to the central office database.

Smith20 describes a mine/UXO survey in Iraq conducted for the UN Mine Action Service to define the country-wide problem by identifying and geo-referencing all of the potentially contaminated locations of mine fields, munition stockpiles, cluster bomb sites, old Iraq-Iran battlefields and standalone missile sites. The work integrated GPS coordinates and parametric information in a GIS that layers socio-economic and hazard data to prioritize sites to clear. Iraqi staff of the UN Mine Advisory Group conducted the survey, developing national capacity to address the long-term problem. Smith reports that the UN urged the Coalition Provisional Authority to create and fund a national management body to coordinate the clearance programs.

2.3 Disaster management

Disaster management is a discipline that evolved from systems for reactive response to emergencies resulting from natural hazards. Many international initiatives, for example UN General Assembly Resolution 57/57821 and the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015, encourage its expansion to include proactive processes for risk reduction and

19

Sébastien Delhay, Mahamadou Idrissa, Vinciane Lacroix. PARADIS: GIS Tools for Humanitarian Demining. Proceedings of the Second International ISCRAM Conference. April 2005

20 Susan Smith. Humanitarian Information Efforts in Iraq -- Creating a Common Operational Picture, GIS Weekly, August 2003

21 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 57/578 of 10 December 2002, which, inter alia, encourages the strengthening of co-operation among States at the regional and sub-regional levels in the field of disaster preparedness and response with particular respect to capacity-building at all levels.

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disaster preparedness. Consequently this review distinguishes risk reduction and emergency response.

A hazard is an environmental condition that has potential for harm, such as high winds or flooding. An emergency is an event in which a hazard causes harm. A disaster is an emergency beyond the capacity of local authorities to control or to manage recovery. Disaster risk is the expectation value of losses that would be caused by a hazard and can be quantified as the product of the severity and likelihood of impact of a hazard.22

Natural hazards can originate entirely from natural phenomena, like earthquakes or cyclones, or they can be anthropogenic, as in the case of flash-flooding as a consequence of deforestation, or an accidental industrial release of toxic chemicals.

2.3.1 Risk reduction

Understanding natural hazards is a prerequisite to eliminating or mitigating risk. GIS has applications for planning, implementing and monitoring risk reduction activities across the hazard spectrum. This section surveys a small sample of them.

2.3.1.1 Epidemiology

Healthmapper23 is a surveillance and mapping application developed by WHO that addresses critical surveillance information needs across infectious disease programmes at national and global levels. The HealthMapper is a user-friendly data management and GIS-based mapping system designed specifically for public health users. It facilitates data standardization, collection and updating of data on epidemiology and interventions and provides immediate visualization of data in the form of maps, tables and charts. The HealthMapper uses a database of geographic, demographic and health information, including the location of populations, health care and education facilities, accessibility by road, access to safe water and demography. The system currently operates to support control of a range of infectious diseases in over 60 countries with WHO presence.

2.3.1.2 Landslide risk

Walther et al24 note the attractiveness of GIS analysis as an alternative to costly long-term geotechnical studies for the identification of landslide risk and evaluate the performance of two GIS-based models using readily available spatial data under extreme meteorological conditions characteristic of events like Hurricane Mitch in Central America in 1998. The deterministic SINMAP model differentiates between areas of lower and higher risk, but with insufficient accuracy. The probabilistic ArcWofE model accurately distinguished areas of high landslide risk but could not hindcast the vast majority of events. They recommend advancement of current understanding of the phenomenon and development of a method that combines the two methods.

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Total Disaster Risk Management - Good Practices. Asian Disaster Reduction Centre. Januray 2005 23 http://www.who.int/health_mapping/tools/healthmapper/en/index.html 24

Steffen Walther, Thomas Oberthur, Jorge Rubiano, Rainer Schultze-Kraft. Evaluation of Two GIS-Based Models for Landslide Prediction. Deutscher Tropentag, October, 2003

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2.3.2 Emergency response

Situation intelligence and coordination are key elements of effective emergency response.

2.3.2.1 Tsunami

An ESRI white paper25 describes shortcomings in the coordination of international actors responding to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Political and information barriers created complex, multidisciplinary problems. Lessons learned from the event identified information which GIS could usefully provide in similar situations, including activity locations and contact information of NGOs and other aid agencies; affected areas prioritized by hazard severity, population density and vulnerability; infrastructure location, function and status; and situation information.

2.3.2.2 Earthquake

Zambrano et al26 report on the use of satellite imagery and GIS to assess damage to urban structures caused by the August 2007 earthquake centred near Pisco, Perú. They describe two techniques. The first, not so effective, attempted to detect and label changes in satellite images acquired before and after the event, which might be associated with changes in building structures caused by the earthquake. The second more successfully detected damage by applying texture filters to post-event imagery to distinguish rubble from intact roofs. The technique allowed quantification of damage in arbitrary units of area, such as city blocks, in terms of percentage area affected, which could help to prioritize recovery efforts.

2.3.2.3 Hurricane

Pennington and Melikian27 reported on the usefulness of GIS and GPS technology in Hurricane Katrina response and recovery efforts. Rescue organizations used an existing New Orleans Regional Planning Commission (NORPC) GIS that has layers of high-resolution satellite imagery, street address information and infrastructure, which provides GPS coordinates, allowing them to navigate flooded streets that were unrecognizable in the absence of street and highway signs. Calls for help to specific street addresses on cellular phones would otherwise have been problematic. The GIS facilitated real time coordination of rescue operations and in the longer term is an essential resource for reconstruction of the city, as it is in all modern urban planning systems.

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GIS and Emergency Management in Indian Ocean Earthquake/Tsunami Disaster. ESRI. May 2006

26 Zambrano R., Alex; Henríquez C., Gustavo; Gonzales Z. Katherine. Contribution of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems on the Damages Assesment in Pisco City After the August 15th 2007 Earthquake. CONIDA, March 2008.

27 Drew Pennington, Gourgen Melikian. GIS Use in the Hurrican Katrina Response and Recovery Efforts. New Orleans Regional Planning Commission, March 2006

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3: CONCLUSIONS

3.1 Improving GIS

Still in its early days, GIS promises more than it delivers. This section discusses some of the more significant problems to be solved before it can be widely useful.

3.1.1 Data standardization

Data are the grist of the GIS mill. They must be collected to be used and the expense of collection discourages effort to make them useful for other than their original purpose. However, data reuse is becoming an important consideration for reducing analysis cost. Organizations willing to share their data, and perhaps hoping to share the cost, publish structured descriptions of their datasets that they call “meta data”, which enable potential users to assess its usefulness to them. As data becomes sharable, it is cheaper and GIS is increasingly useful. Standardization of meta data structures will contribute to a breakthrough in data reuse and GIS use.

Free GIS web-based clients such as Google Earth and Arc Explorer use the internet to access mainly free datasets designed for them. The selection is small but growing and independent data providers are working to offer more. Akin to the meta data standardization problem, data standardization issues constrain progress. However, some simple measures could expose huge bodies of information for business, public and scientific use. As a well-established example, the World Meteorological Office has integrated weather and climate data collection and weather forecasting around the globe on the basis of data standards. Similar recognition by national bureaux of statistics and financial institutions of global standards for socio-economic data would be of huge benefit to researchers in international development and humanitarian action. In general, global organizations which establish data standards of interest to them have a critical mass in many cases sufficient to encourage the world community of those interests to adopt their standards.

3.1.2 Clean datasets

As the scientists’ lament goes, “garbage in, garbage out”: not just any data will do in their analyses. Computers do not tolerate syntactic inconsistency easily, nor do humans accept semantic inconsistency. Consequently, users must carefully design and process data to fit their applications. Data from real life are messy, with anomalies that may distort their representation of reality. GIS analysts take pains to understand the data they use so that they can remove noise and outliers that alter its meaning, without introducing corruption themselves. The time and skills required to do this currently make GIS a specialist’s tool beyond the reach of casual users.

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3.1.3 Simple user interfaces

The arcane workings of current-generation GIS tools discourage all but trained experts. Just as computing is not longer the exclusive domain of computer scientists, so GIS must be made accessible to workers in other fields. Wide use of GIS depends on software tools with simple controls that produce repeatable, understandable results. Free software such as Google Earth and Arc Explorer are the beginning of a trend which will give users functions that hide the complexity of the powerful database queries that selectively display information layers and their intersections. These tools mimic their expensive GIS parents, without all of their flexibility.

3.1.4 Intellectual property

Data is expensive to capture and maintain, and like other intellectual property it should reward its owners, to encourage them to make it available. Global conventions should institutionalize mechanisms to protect them. Business models that exploit subscription and advertising revenues have been effective to date for implementing sustainable information sharing which respects data owners, so continued expansion of data availability for globally-distributed GIS applications seems likely.

3.1.5 Bandwidth for global data sharing

Bandwidth is the quantitative capacity of an information channel to carry information. Network capacities constrain the amount and delivery of data for humanitarian information sharing. The increasing size of data characteristic of modern multi-media information challenges the limits of current technology, particularly in remote locations. Whether organizational control is central or distributed, information must flow in both directions between the centre and the field, and in many cases among field offices. The low- or even no-bandwidth environments typical of humanitarian emergencies are unfavourable to GIS processing of distributed data. This will not be the case for much longer; even now satellite telephony offers global connectivity, although the cost is high and the bandwidth is limited. The forces of globalization press insistently for communication advances that will soon, even in this first decade of the century, provide high-speed internet connection virtually everywhere.

3.2 Research areas

Twumasi and Merem28 use spatial and temporal GIS to examine the dynamism of Sub-Saharan African riverine ecosystems in the River Niger Region. They anticipate conflict among nations on the river resulting from failure to understand and resolve watershed management problems. Questions include: what declines in the riverine ecosystem of the study area can be identified? What are the effects and what factors trigger the changes? What mitigation measures are in place for dealing with the problems? This research could be extended to establish a measure of conflict potential for early warning of complex emergencies according to the principle of conflict prevention in the R2P.

28

Yaw A. Twumasi, Edmund C. Merem. Using Remote Sensing and GIS in the Analysis of Ecosystem Decline along the River Niger Basin: The Case of Mali and Niger. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2007

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Prinz29 conducted a change detection analysis of Landsat ETM+ data from the conflict-affected area of Darfur Province in Sudan to demonstrate that the recent (2003-2004) widespread burning of villages can be mapped with high accuracy at a much lower cost than other methods. By comparing albedo from two images with a 1 year interval, he found that approximately half of the 352 survey villages had a decreased reflection pattern that could be linked to being burnt. The method permits cost effective and large scale mapping and monitoring of certain types of human rights abuse, such as scorched-earth tactics. Again, this is consistent with the prevention principle in R2P.

Wood et al30 discuss GIS-based programs in Kosovo and potential applications for response coordination, rapid provision of basic needs and public security, political dialogue, human rights, and sustained economic development. Complex emergencies continue to challenge the international community. GIS offers an analytically powerful information management tool for geo-referenced data. In inevitable future complex emergencies, the issue will not be what GIS is capable of, but rather how it can be best applied to support effective collaborations before, during, and after responders deploy into the crisis zone.

The Human Security Project could examine its datasets for spatially-coded information and provide a web interface to a GIS which accesses that data to layer it on satellite imagery and maps available cheaply from sources like Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth and Arc Explorer. The facility could offer exemplary applications such as the model that demonstrates relations among insurgencies, lootable resources and conflict, but its stronger appeal would be support of quickly assembled arbitrary experiments. This would at least make the HSP portal more engaging and might even aid research.

3.3 Concluding remarks

GIS has become essential in the prevention of, planning for, response to and monitoring of humanitarian emergencies. Many UN organizations, WHO, UNHR, WFP and OCHA among them, and other international aid agencies have dedicated GIS work groups.31 Benefits include improvements in analytical methods for understanding the spatial and temporal nature of emergencies, synergies with remote sensing, communications and other technologies that are more than the sum of the parts, and better humanitarian operations management. GIS can make a significant contribution to the effectiveness of humanitarian action by enhancing analysis, communication and coordination capabilities of organizations in policy development and in the field.

However, the technology is still far below its potential and the expectations of humanitarian actors. Although much progress has been made since computers first enabled GIS, many problems remain to be solved. Datasets are difficult and expensive to construct, user interfaces are arcane, models are complex and fraught with subtle flaws and few people have the skills necessary to work past these obstacles.

29 Prins, E. (2008) Use of low cost Landsat ETM+ to spot burnt villages in Darfur, Sudan, International Journal of Remote Sensing, 29:4, 1207 – 1214 30

Wood, William B. (2000) Complex emergency response planning and coordination: Potential GIS applications, Geopolitics, 5:1, 19 – 36

31 Reinhard Kaiser, Paul B. Spiegel, Alden K. Henderson, Michael L. Gerber. The Application of Geographical Information Systems and Global Positioning Systems in Humanitarian Emergiencies: Lessons Learned, Programme Implications and Future Research. Disasters, 2003

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This situation will not remain for long. Hardware, software and communication technologies evolve rapidly. Endemic and probably increasing, conflict and natural disasters motivate mitigation efforts that force advances which must include GIS development. Movement toward data standardization, already apparent, will make huge bodies of socio-economic information available for GIS analysis. Tools will evolve to simplify data collection and preparation. GIS software developers will establish conventions for user interfaces and analytical methods. Just as spreadsheet technology became mainstream two decades ago, GIS will become a generalized tool that experts in other fields use without devoting a career to acquiring the skills. With all of these problems solved, GIS may face new problems and expectations that are difficult to conceive now.