Shaping the future: Our strategy for research and innovation in humanitarian response.
Nepal faces devastation each year from floods, landslides, and avalanches, which cause fatalities and displaced people. Critical for both disasters preparedness and recovery is knowledge about the affected area—where people live, road conditions, locations of clinics and medical facilities—and aerial imagery is one of the most precise and efficient methods for collecting that information.
While low resolution satellite imagery exists, it is rarely of sufficient quality to support responders in critical decision making after disasters. As unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, can collect aerial imagery with far superior resolution, they offer a potential solution, and as a result exploration of community centred approaches to UAVs has begun in Haiti and the Philippines.
The use of UAVs for commercial purposes is already well established. This project expands their use to the humanitarian sphere in Nepal. UAVs will be used to produce maps in areas where aerial imagery is limited. UAVs can provide responders with high-resolution aerial imagery that can inform preparedness, mitigation and response efforts.
This innovation will build on the lessons learned and best practices in community driven approaches to UAVs in order to develop a working model in Nepal. This will enable local communities to rapidly deploy UAVs for disaster preparedness and response.
The use of UAV imagery in Nepal will enable the development of up-to-date base maps to use for disaster preparation and high-resolution imagery post-disaster that will inform decision making by humanitarian responders.
It is expected that this project will improve humanitarian response in Nepal by:
This project should produce:
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