Enhanced Community DRR Mapping

Enhanced Community DRR Mapping | Sune Holt | LinkedIn

Sune Holt

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Country Coordinator at Danish Red Cross

Enhanced Community DRR Mapping Jan 27, 2016

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Written by: Sune Holt, Otílio Baquete, Manuel Mambuque and Sergio Angelo

“Knowing where things are, and why, makes decision making a lot more useful – and easier”

Cruz Vermelha de Mozambique (CVM) and Danish Red Cross (DRC) has been working together in a partnership since 1998. From 2008 the focus has been on Disaster Management (DM) and from 2010 the focus was shifted towards Disaster Risk

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/enhanced-community-mapping-drr-themes-sune-holt?trk=mp-author-card[24-02-2016 13:55:27]

Enhanced Community DRR Mapping | Sune Holt | LinkedIn

Reduction (DRR) in the Inhambane Province. This post is to share some of our experiences on how to make community mapping even more useful. Adding another detail to a map is sometimes a slow, but important process. As a community in this part of Mozambique often has an extension between 40 to 100 Km2, time will not allow us to inspect every issue and detail in the field, but by using some readily available tools, the final thematic maps can actually end up with a lot of details and with an accuracy of 10 meters at the best thus serving as excellent and inexpensive planning and information tools.

Mapping is not just a few days of work; it’s a process or can even consist of several processes in parallel, where different teams focus on multiple issues e.g. DRR, health, WASH and livelihood. Mapping of infrastructure, such as houses, schools, health posts and water wells is just the beginning. Next, when these “layers” are enriched with information on rivers, frequently flooded areas, location of important natural resources, forest, agriculture, fishery, biodiversity, erosion, and topography, we suddenly have a good base for the production of various important thematic maps. Dependent on your needs and access to information you can even add health and socioeconomic information to your map and will probably see patterns in this information that otherwise wouldn’t have been visible. But always remember, you should never make maps just for the sake of mapping, but because the use of them really improves the quality and efficiency of your work.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/enhanced-community-mapping-drr-themes-sune-holt?trk=mp-author-card[24-02-2016 13:55:27]

Enhanced Community DRR Mapping | Sune Holt | LinkedIn

Try to take a look at this GoogleEarth image above and see for yourself how easy it is to spot the circular traditional houses, the roads and foot paths, and how the human activity has exposed the bare soil according to the intensity of traffic. You can even see each tree on the ground and with a little bit of training you can tell a mango tree from another kind of tree. Our enhanced community maps are made from hundreds of such images. It is important that it primarily is the community that provides the information to enter the map. Firstly, it’s the community that has the best knowledge to the area, and secondly it’s the community that eventually will use the map for planning of various emergency situations and thereby contributes to the risk reduction under different types of natural disasters affecting each community. Over the years we have worked with community mapping without enhancing the maps at all. But by enhancing them we adapt the information provided by the community into a geographic much more accurate and reliable context by editing exact locations, shapes, sizes and distances. To do this, we use a simple geographic information system (GIS) program, map and/or satellite information as for example GoogleEarth and other available data. And why is this so important? Even you live in the same community all your life, you rarely become familiar with its full extension of the simple reason that more than 50Km2 of land is a big area to cover

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/enhanced-community-mapping-drr-themes-sune-holt?trk=mp-author-card[24-02-2016 13:55:27]

Enhanced Community DRR Mapping | Sune Holt | LinkedIn

and it might not be easily accessible all of it. We can see that when we do community mapping exercises with the communities we support. Generally, what’s near to the community center, most members of a community can show pretty well on a drawing, but when we get a few kilometers or longer away, the problems begin. Often houses and footpaths are “forgotten”, areas with no significant land-use are ignored, and the river will just be replicated as a straight line despite it really follows a winding course. Typically, the things that are closest to the community center will be over-represented, while the more remotely located issues will be under-represented when making community maps because the majority of the community members just see it that way. All the above is important if the map shall serve e.g. for evacuation purposes or tell where construction of houses should be disencouraged due to high risk of e.g. flooding or landslides. Other practical uses are for example to encourage that Red Cross volunteers represent most of the extension of their community and not all come from the central part of it; and securing that the physical location of the most vulnerable members of the community is known so they can get priority attention in case of e.g. a disaster. We have discovered that when the enhanced community map is elaborated, it will not only serve as a tool on planning of evacuation routes etc. but will actually improve the quality of our Red Cross work by providing more exact information on the social and bio-physical conditions of the community and improve and ease the dissemination of results. Before showing a few examples of images and maps we will like to emphasize that mapping has its advantages and limits. It is hard to see from a GoogleEarth image if there is a house under a tree or not, although after practicing mapping for a while, you will start to see more and more details. Even you can’t see a house on the image, often the pattern of footpaths and grass trampled down will reveal whether there is a house or not. Furthermore, even your map should have say 10% errors it is still likely to be a great help. On the other hand you can also be lucky that a GoogleEarth image easily will show you something that is hard to see while walking in the terrain. In particular, we found the images very useful when identifying flooded areas. The evaporation of water after a flooding often leaves white rims on the images that are easy to see. This is simply salt drying up on the surface of the soil. Administrative

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/enhanced-community-mapping-drr-themes-sune-holt?trk=mp-author-card[24-02-2016 13:55:27]

Enhanced Community DRR Mapping | Sune Holt | LinkedIn

boundaries between two communities are mostly invisible on the map if you don’t know which road or river might follow the administrative boundary, but with roads, houses and other structures in place and presented on the map, the draft map itself is a powerful tool to use together with interviews and focus group meetings. There is almost always a way to get the information either directly or indirectly if you really need it.

Example from the Vuca Interior community map located in the Inhambane Province of Mozambique showing roads (thick red lines), footpaths (thin red lines), river and water bodies (blue), frequently flooded areas (light-blue), forests (green), traditional round houses (brown circles), concrete houses (pink squares), and community boundary (pink line). All themes are composed of separate layers that can be turned on or off. Here only an overview of the typical base map is shown. The zoom-function allows us to present details down to a very detailed level. Please note the scale bar in the lower-left corner of the map.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/enhanced-community-mapping-drr-themes-sune-holt?trk=mp-author-card[24-02-2016 13:55:27]

Enhanced Community DRR Mapping | Sune Holt | LinkedIn

Keywords: Disaster Risk Reduction, Community Development, Red Cross

Comments:

Alasan Senghore

Director of Africa Zone at International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies Great post! https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/enhanced-community-mapping-drr-themes-sune-holt?trk=mp-author-card

Júlio Armando Mondlane Bem feito Sune Holt!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/enhanced-community-mapping-drr-themes-sune-holt?trk=mp-author-card[24-02-2016 13:55:27]