The Role of Geospatial Information in Post-Crisis Damage Assessment

Humanitarian response can be viewed as an opportunity to launch processes to better achieve longer term development using the momentum provided by reconstruction and disaster risk reduction after large natural disasters.  This is a brief account of how technology, inspiration and collaboration were used to quickly assess the damage caused by the Haiti earthquake in January 2010.

In less than a minute, this event leveled approximately 20 percent of the buildings in greater Port-au-Prince; killed close to a quarter of a million people; injured as many; and left over a million individuals homeless.  This event ranks as one of the deadliest earthquakes of the 21st century. This event will also be known as one of the first events where remote sensing technology and analysis of high-resolution imagery was embraced at such a large scale in a real operational sense. 

From the very outset of the disaster, high-resolution satellite imagery was available through commercial companies. The analysis of this data by the UNITAR Operational Satellite Applications Programme – UNOSAT provided the first glimpse of the devastation caused by this earthquake and helped national actors and international agencies to better organize and coordinate rescue efforts. The rapid mapping effort soon developed into a large scale effort to determine the extent and impact of the disaster. An innovative and unprecedented partnership was created between UNITAR/UNOSAT, the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the World Bank supported by the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) with participation from the private sector and the national authorities in charge of geospatial information in Haiti.

The result was an integrated large scale damage assessment for the entire area affected in which each building damaged was accounted for and included in databases then put at the disposal of national authorities and field teams. The role of field teams and in particular the Haitian people was of strategic importance in creating the first assessment in which technology provided the main basis of knowledge for determining the impact of a catastrophe of this size.

Today as Haiti rebuilds itself, its government, citizens and its technical agencies can rely on larger than ever geospatial data, a more complete knowledge base of its territory, and enhanced capacity to harness technology to face the fundamental problems of territorial development. This is in a nutshell the power of a strategic partnership founded on technology but resolutely aimed at changing the policy of planning development: we had the technology AND we used it. Together and in context.