'Leave No-One Behind' - Estimating and Mapping Populations in Off-Grid and Hard-to-Reach Places in Mangrove Areas of West Africa
Abstract
People living in hard-to-reach areas, such as remote riverine regions, protected areas and high-elevation areas, have been historically underserved in development projects and lag behind on the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as they are often under-reported by traditional data sources and still missed by cell phone data and night-time lights records. Information about the location, size, and accessibility of these very vulnerable populations is a prerequisite to achieving sustainable development. However, attempts to map and estimate population size in these off-grid, hard-to-reach areas have often been ad-hoc or poorly documented. To date there are no well-established methodologies to provide disaggregated information to help various organizations better target development and adaptation planning, and achieve SDGs related to climate action, poverty reduction, and to improving access to basic services.
Recent progress in the spatial resolution of remote-sensed data, in computational capabilities, and in the collection and use of crowdsourced data offer an interesting opportunity to provide the missing information on small, hard-to-reach settlements as an alternative to systematic surveys that may be unsustainable in low-income countries with limited human and data resources. We will present intermediary results of an initiative that leverages high-resolution satellite images, volunteered geographic information (VGI) and modeling, to provide information on small settlements within mangrove areas of six data-poor countries in West Africa. Additional information, such as distances to major centers and paved roads will also be included. The information is collected and disseminated through two online mapping interfaces. The first interface captures and stores VGI to estimate and cross validate population predictions. The second interface is a publicly accessible web application allowing various end-users to access population estimates in the mangrove areas of West Africa at different scales. Information is released with estimates of confidence and error. The tool targets in particular national, regional, and international organizations and NGOs working in conservation, climate change adaptation, and disaster risk reduction.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMIN33B0862T
- Keywords:
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- 0240 Public health;
- GEOHEALTHDE: 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1980 Spatial analysis and representation;
- INFORMATICSDE: 4330 Vulnerability;
- NATURAL HAZARDS