One of the greatest benefits of using mobile technology is that can enable speedy communications in even the most remote areas of the world. While this is useful in most circumstances, it is particularly important for improving emergency response times in developing countries, as well as to ensure that the right services are being delivered to the people and communities with the greatest need. The World Food Program is making great use of ICTs in their emergency response as are the other UN agencies with which they collaborate in the Emergency Telecommunications Cluster (ETC). This group focuses on utilizing mobile solutions to ensure that aid workers are able to communicate efficiently with other aid workers and organizations to address the emergency at hand and deliver necessary services in a timely manner. Innovative ICTs are an essential part of emergency response work across the globe today.
Crisis mapping is a similar field that is making smart use of relevant mobile technologies. It is more participatory in nature, taking advantage of crowd-sourced information in order to gather a large amount of data across sometimes very geographically disparate locations to create a quick snapshot of a crisis or emergency. Using this information, crisis mappers can then take action and provide instant updates to local emergency response workers.
As explained by Crisis Mappers (the humanitarian technology network): “Crisis Mappers leverage mobile & web-based applications, participatory maps & crowdsourced event data, aerial & satellite imagery, geospatial platforms, advanced visualization, live simulation, and computational & statistical models to power effective early warning for rapid response to complex humanitarian emergencies. As information scientists we also attempt to extract meaning from mass volumes of real-time data exhaust.”
The NGO MapAction is dedicated specifically to the task of creating crisis maps and providing vital updates to local emergency responders by deploying teams of mappers all over the world within hours of a the occurrence of a crisis. One of the most commonly cited examples of crisis mapping is the Ushahidi-Haiti Project, which helped to bring attention to the field and provided valuable data to inform future crisis mapping initiatives.
Across development fields, mapping data points continues to become more popular. As ever, just because we have geospatial data for everything under the sun does not necessarily make it useful information. There are plenty of instances where rather than illuminating a data set, mapping the data merely complicates the informational picture. Crisis mapping for emergency response serves a clear purpose does not fall under this category. Improved data sharing and mapping techniques will only serve the international humanitarian network.
