<
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-13/when-climate-disaster-strikes-slums-are-especially-vulnerable>
"On a cloudy morning in early May, Charles Gamys sends his drone skyward. Once
it’s about 120 meters (390 feet) in the air, he starts to take photos of the
landscape below: rows upon rows of shacks, connected by unpaved alleys and
dotted with oil palm trees.
These are no casual snapshots. Gamys, 30, is helping create the first map of
Blamo Town, an informal settlement outside Monrovia, Liberia’s capital. Blamo
Town has been around for almost 70 years and is home to about 20,000 people. On
official maps, though, it’s depicted with scant detail. On Google Maps, you
can’t see it at all.
Globally, more than 1 billion people—about 1 in 4 urban dwellers—live in
informal settlements such as Blamo Town, defined as slums by the United
Nations. Day to day, residents of Monrovia’s slums cook, clean, work and gather
in tightly packed lean-tos resourcefully built out of mud and scrap metal.
But when natural disasters strike, everything about these settlements becomes a
liability, including the lack of mapping. Flooding happens quickly. Structures
deteriorate easily. Rescuers don’t know where to go. When the city government
works on climate-resilience planning, slums are out of sight, out of mind.
“Slums can be more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than other types
of neighborhoods,” says Caroline Gevaert, an associate professor at the Faculty
of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation at the University of Twente in
the Netherlands. “It is really crucial to do the mapping.”
That’s where the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) comes in. The
Washington-based nongovernmental organization joins forces with several other
aid groups and residents of slums to put places like Blamo Town on the map,
literally. They use drones to create aerial imagery of each settlement and
local mappers to interview residents and document every road and structure."
Via David Byrne at
Reasons to be Cheerful:
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-celebrating-juneteenth-preparing-for-heat-waves-and-more/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
