Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/33025
Crisis Mapping with GIS: A Game Changer EDGENODES Y BY NIGEL WATERS ou may have missed it, but on Dec. 22, 1989, the 1990s were designated by the United Nations General Assembly as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR). The objective was to mitigate by coordinated international cooperation “the loss of life, property damage, and social and economic disruption caused by natural disasters such as earthquakes, windstorms, tsunamis, floods, landslides, volcanic eruptions, wildfires … and other calamities of natural origin.” (See www. undemocracy.com/A-RES-44-236.pdf.) GIS’ Promise, IDNDR’s Failure At the start of the 1990s, many believed that GIS might help in the task of natural-disaster reduction. There was the obvious potential to use GIS to allevi- ate the impact of disasters due to human agency. When the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on March 24, 1989, subsequent court action imposed a settlement of $900 million on Exxon. Payment of this settlement stretched through a 10-year period and helped fund a restoration plan that used GIS to alleviate the oil spill’s impact. However, not everyone was convinced that IDNDR would achieve its goals. Toward the end of the 1990s, Carrara et al. (1999) published an article that described many of the limitations of GIS technol- ogy in predicting and monitoring natural hazards, in general, and landslides, in particular. Among the inherent difficulties of GIS technology Nigel Waters, editor of Cartographica, is a professor of geography and director for the Center of Excellence for Geographic Information Science, George Mason University; e-mail: nwaters@gmu.edu. 12 for hazard prediction and mitigation, they cited the difficulty in acquiring data, the complexity of predictive models, the lack of user-friendly graphical interfaces, the high cost of digitization and hardware bottlenecks. They concluded: “If the technical, cultural, economic and political reasons for this unhealthy state cannot be adequately tackled, the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction will probably come to an end without achieving significant advances in the prediction and control of natural disasters.” The subsequent decade saw their dire warning fully justified. GEO W ORLD / M AY 2O11 The recent spate of tragedies hopefully will galvanize the geospatial community to develop more-effective modeling approaches. The Deadly 2000s The beginning of the 21st Century has indeed been deadly in terms of natural disasters. This short pe- riod of time has seen three of the deadliest natural disasters of the previous 100 years (the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, with more than 230,000 deaths; the 2010 Haiti earthquake, with more than 222,000 deaths; and the 2008 Myanmar Cyclone Nargis, with more than 138,000 deaths); three of the deadli- est avalanches in the last 100 years; six of the 50 deadliest earthquakes in all of recorded history (this includes the 2011 Tohoku earthquake in Japan); and the two deadliest heat waves again during the last 100 years (2010 in Russia and 2003 in Europe, with 56,000 and 40,000 deaths, respectively). Although predicting these disasters remains a challenge, mitigating their impact before and after they occur is becoming less difficult through GIS technology, and Ushahidi is leading the way. Ushahidi: GIS Technology for the Suffering Ushahidi (meaning “testimony” in Swahili; www. ushahidi.com) was originally developed in 2008 as a Web mashup platform for mapping incidents of political violence during the crisis that followed the Kenyan presidential elections held in December 2007. After this initial success, the core team of co-founders, Ory Okolloh, Erik Hersman, David Kobia and Juliana Rotich, turned the Web site into an open-source platform for crisis mapping of political violence and natural disasters. Ushahidi remains quintessentially an African company, with more than 45,000 users in Kenya and a strong presence in Ghana, South Africa and Malawi, but contributors and partners now may be found throughout the world, including in the United States and many European countries.