A Review of Geospatial Information Technology for Natural Disaster Management in Developing Countries

Disasters are deadly and destructive events, particularly in developing countries where economic, social, political and cultural factors increase natural hazard vulnerability. The recent devastation of the Haiti earthquake on January 12th, 2010 was a prime example of the human toll a natural disaster can take in developing regions of the world. There is an imminent need to improve natural disaster management capacity in developing countries to reduce disaster impacts. Given that disasters are spatial phenomenon, the application of geospatial information technology GIT is essential to the natural disaster management process. However, in developing countries there are numerous barriers to the effective use of GIT, especially at the local level, including limited financial and human resources and a lack of critical spatial data required to support GIT use to improve disaster management related decision making processes. The results of a thorough literature review suggests that currently available free and open source GIT FOS GIT offers great potential to overcome some of these barriers. Thus, disaster management practitioners in developing countries could harness this potential in an attempt to reduce hazard vulnerability and improve disaster management capacity. The use of FOS GIT significantly reduces software costs and can help build local level GIT knowledge/technical skills that are required for successful GIT implementation.

[1]  Ian Masser,et al.  Management of Natural Hazard Risk in Cartago, Costa Rica , 2005 .

[2]  Martin Schmitz,et al.  Use of Landsat 7 Etm + Data as Basic Information for Infrastructure Planning , 2005 .

[3]  Ian Cook,et al.  Implementing eGovernment without promoting dependence: open source software in developing countries in Southeast Asia† , 2006 .

[4]  Vincent R. Gray.  Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis Summary for Policymakers , 2007 .

[5]  J. Vogt,et al.  Natural Hazards Monitoring:Forest Fires, Droughts And Floods - The Example Of European Pilot Projects , 2000 .

[6]  K V Venkatachary,et al.  Space Technology and Applications for Disaster Management , 2004 .

[7]  Norman Kerle,et al.  Satellite remote sensing as a tool in Lahar disaster management. , 2002, Disasters.

[8]  D. Simpson,et al.  Large-scale vulnerability assessments for natural hazards , 2008 .

[9]  Eric A. Brewer,et al.  The case for technology in developing regions , 2005, Computer.

[10]  Richard Oloruntoba,et al.  A wave of destruction and the waves of relief: issues, challenges and strategies , 2005 .

[11]  H. Kanamori,et al.  The Great Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake of 26 December 2004 , 2005, Science.

[12]  Geoffrey Anderson,et al.  Building Web‐Based Spatial Information Solutions around Open Specifications and Open Source Software , 2003, Trans. GIS.

[13]  Richard Heeks,et al.  Information Systems and Developing Countries: Failure, Success, and Local Improvisations , 2002, Inf. Soc..

[14]  David A. Wheeler,et al.  Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FOSS)? Look at the Numbers! , 2005 .

[15]  Pamela S. Showalter.  Remote sensing’s use in disaster research: a review , 2001 .

[16]  Harlan J. Onsrud,et al.  Open-Source Geographic Information Systems Software: Myths and Realities , 2004 .

[17]  Zubair A. Opeyemi,et al.  Harnessing Nigeria's Investment in Satellite Technology for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security , 2012, Int. J. Appl. Geospat. Res..

[18]  Enrico L Quarantelli,et al.  What Is a Disaster: Perspectives on the Question , 1999 .

[19]  Andre Zerger,et al.  Impediments to using GIS for real-time disaster decision support , 2003, Comput. Environ. Urban Syst..

[20]  Juergen Weichselgartner,et al.  Disaster mitigation: the concept of vulnerability revisited , 2001 .

[21]  Craig Laben.  Integration of remote sensing data and geographic information system technology for emergency managers and their applications at the Pacific Disaster Center , 2002 .

[22]  Ilan Kelman,et al.  The potential for combining indigenous and western knowledge in reducing vulnerability to environmental hazards in small island developing states , 2007 .

[23]  Ping Chen,et al.  Tsunami damage assessment using high resolution satellite imagery: a case study of Aceh, Indonesia , 2005, Proceedings. 2005 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2005. IGARSS '05..

[24]  M. Hussain,et al.  Emerging geo-information technologies (GIT) for natural disaster management in Pakistan: an overview , 2005, Proceedings of 2nd International Conference on Recent Advances in Space Technologies, 2005. RAST 2005..

[25]  Noemi De La Ville,et al.  Remote Sensing and GIS Technologies as Tools to Support Sustainable Management of Areas Devastated by Landslides , 2002 .

[26]  Brian Fitzgerald,et al.  A Critical Look at Open Source , 2004, Computer.

[27]  Michael Auer,et al.  Real-Time Web GIS Analysis Using WebGL , 2012, Int. J. 3 D Inf. Model..

[28]  D. McEntire.  Triggering agents, vulnerabilities and disaster reduction: towards a holistic paradigm , 2001 .

[29]  Alejandro Bugacov,et al.  Integrating geographic information systems, spatial digital libraries and information spaces for conducting humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations in urban environments , 1999, GIS '99.

[30]  Rabindra Osti,et al.  Flood hazard mapping in developing countries: problems and prospects , 2008 .

[31]  Pinliang Dong.  DEVELOPMENT OF A GIS / GPS-BASED EMERGENCY RESPONSE SYSTEM , 2005 .

[32]  Brandon Plewe.  GIS Online: Information Retrieval, Mapping, and the Internet , 1997 .

[33]  Norio Okada,et al.  Towards integrated disaster risk management: case studies and trends from Asia , 2008 .

[34]  Contributions from M. Walpole.  The Millennium Development Goals Report , 2008 .

[35]  James M. R. Britton,et al.  GIS Capacity Building in the Pacific Island Countries: Facing the Realities of Technology, Resources, Geography and Cultural Difference , 2000, Cartogr. Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Geovisualization.

[36]  G. Amdahl.  Disaster Response: GIS for Public Safety , 2001 .

[37]  Timothy C. Coburn,et al.  Geographical Information Systems: Principles, Techniques, Applications and Management: 2nd Edition, Volumes 1 and 2, Paul A. Longley, Michael F. Goodchild, David J. Maguire and David W. Rhind (Eds.), 11240 pp., Wiley, New York, 1999, ISBN 0-471-32182-6, US $345.00 , 2000 .

[38]  Alias Abdullah,et al.  GIS Implementation in Malaysian Statutory Development Plan System , 2010 .

[39]  David A. McEntire,et al.  Issues in disaster relief: progress, perpetual problems and prospective solutions , 1999 .

[40]  Shattri Mansor,et al.  Spatial technology for natural risk management , 2004 .

[41]  Susan L. Cutter,et al.  GI Science, Disasters, and Emergency Management , 2003, Trans. GIS.

[42]  K Hewitt,et al.  Excluded Perspectives in the Social Construction of Disaster , 1995, International Journal of Mass Emergencies & Disasters.

[43]  Richard Sliuzas,et al.  " Research issues for the adoption of Geographic Information Technology for Urban Planning and Management in developing countries , 2003 .

[44]  Michael F. Goodchild.  GIS and disasters: Planning for catastrophe , 2006, Comput. Environ. Urban Syst..

[45]  Hassan A. Karimi,et al.  Current and future directions in GISs , 1996 .

[46]  Makoto Nishigaki,et al.  Evaluating Flood Hazard for Land-Use Planning in Greater Dhaka of Bangladesh Using Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques , 2007 .

[47]  Ashraf M. Dewan,et al.  Delineating flood risk areas in Greater Dhaka of Bangladesh using geoinformatics , 2007 .

[48]  Joseph R. Francica.  GIS and the Future in Business IT , 2005 .

[49]  Boris Blagonić,et al.  Local Spatial Data Infrastructure , 2013 .

[50]  Giacomo Rambaldi,et al.  Participatory Spatial Information Management and Communication in Developing Countries , 2006, Electron. J. Inf. Syst. Dev. Ctries..

[51]  Bartel Van de Walle,et al.  Open source software for disaster management , 2007, Commun. ACM.

[52]  Tomaz Podobnikar,et al.  Universal Ontology of Geographic Space: Semantic Enrichment for Spatial Data , 2012 .

[53]  B H Morrow,et al.  Identifying and mapping community vulnerability. , 1999, Disasters.

[54]  Jay Lee,et al.  Impact of Spatial Filtering on the Least Cost Path Method: Selecting a High-Speed Rail Route for Ohio's 3-C Corridor , 2010, Int. J. Appl. Geospat. Res..

[55]  Ravindra K. Pande.  Participation in practice and disaster management: experience of Uttaranchal (India) , 2006 .

[56]  Marta Guinau,et al.  A feasible methodology for landslide susceptibility assessment in developing countries: A case-study of NW Nicaragua after Hurricane Mitch , 2005 .

[57]  Chennat Gopalakrishnan,et al.  Advances in Decision Support Systems for Flood Disaster Management: Challenges and Opportunities , 2005 .

[58]  S. S. Tickodri-Togboa,et al.  OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES FOR SDI DEVELOPMENT IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES - A CASE STUDY OF UGANDA , 2004 .

[59]  Costas A. Varotsos,et al.  Environmental disasters : anthropogenic and natural , 2002 .

[60]  Mohamed A. Mohamed,et al.  Remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) for developing countries , 2002, IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium.

[61]  L. Henderson,et al.  Emergency and Disaster: Pervasive Risk and Public Bureaucracy in Developing Nations , 2004 .

[62]  J. Coppock.  Gis and Natural Hazards: An overview from a Gis Perspective , 1995 .

[63]  Paul K Freeman,et al.  Infrastructure in developing and transition countries: risk and protection. , 2003, Risk analysis : an official publication of the Society for Risk Analysis.

[64]  P. Lipman.  Natural hazards , 1993, Nature.

[65]  Menno-Jan Kraak,et al.  The role of the map in a Web-GIS environment , 2004, J. Geogr. Syst..

[66]  Nah Soo Hoe.  Breaking barriers : the potential of free and open source software for sustainable human development; a compilation of case studies from across the world , 2007 .

[67]  Jan Turkstra,et al.  Local spatial data infrastructure, Trujillo - Peru , 2003 .

[68]  Laura Díaz,et al.  Open Source Based Deployment of Environmental Data into Geospatial Information Infrastructures , 2012, Int. J. Appl. Geospat. Res..

[69]  Renyi Liu,et al.  Flood area and damage estimation in Zhejiang, China. , 2002, Journal of environmental management.

[70]  Slobodan P. Simonovic,et al.  Role of Remote Sensing in Disaster Management , 2002 .

[71]  Jacob P. Kovel,et al.  Using GIS in Emergency Management Operations , 2000 .

[72]  Steven Weber,et al.  The Success of Open Source , 2004 .

[73]  Ying-Dar Lin,et al.  Open Source Software Development: An Overview , 2001, Computer.

[74]  J. C. Rivereau.  Spot data applied to disaster prevention and damage assessment , 1995 .

[75]  Trevor M. Harris,et al.  Participatory GIS: opportunity or oxymoron? , 1998 .

[76]  Keith Smith.  Environmental Hazards: Assessing Risk and Reducing Disaster , 1991 .

[77]  Binh Pham,et al.  OpenCIS—Open Source GIS‐based web community information system , 2006, Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci..

[78]  Manoj K. Jha,et al.  Multi Depot Probabilistic Vehicle Routing Problems with a Time Window: Theory, Solution and Application , 2011, Int. J. Oper. Res. Inf. Syst..

[79]  Wan Nor Azmin Sulaiman,et al.  Open source geographical resources analysis support system (GRASS) for landslide hazard assessment , 2005 .

[80]  Douglas Nebert,et al.  Developing Spatial Data Infrastructures: The SDI Cookbook , 2001 .

[81]  Piyoosh Rautela,et al.  Implications of ignoring the old disaster management plans , 2005 .

[82]  T. Cova.  GIS in emergency management , 2005 .

[83]  Steven Jennings,et al.  Modeling Subalpine and Upper Montane Forest-Climate Interactions in Colorado: A Comparative Study Using GIS , 2014, Int. J. Appl. Geospat. Res..

[84]  U. R. Rao,et al.  Managing the natural disasters from space technology inputs , 1997 .

[85]  Graham Tipple,et al.  Natural Disaster, Mitigation and Sustainability: The Case of Developing Countries , 2002 .

[86]  G. Brent Hall,et al.  The Internet, Spatial Data Globalization, and Data Use: The Case of Tibet , 2007, Inf. Soc..

[87]  Liu Renyi,et al.  Flood area and damage estimation in Zhejiang, China , 2002 .

[88]  Burton Al.  The environment as hazard , 1978 .

[89]  P. Hardin,et al.  Remote sensing/GIS integration to identify potential low-income housing sites , 2000 .

[90]  David Alexander,et al.  A survey of the field of natural hazards and disaster studies , 1995 .

[91]  D. Sheridan,et al.  Social Vulnerability to Environmental Hazards , 2010 .

[92]  Abbas Rajabifard,et al.  Facilitating Disaster Management Using SDI , 2004 .

[93]  S. Ormerod,et al.  The environment as hazard: (2nd edn). By I. Burton, R. W. Kates & G. F. White. Guildford Press, New York, 1993, ISBN 0-89862-159-3, 290 pp. Price: £16.99 , 1995 .

[94]  Michael G. Sovereign,et al.  A Framework for Designing a Global Information Network for Multinational Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief , 2000, Inf. Syst. Frontiers.

[95]  V. Mayer-Schönberger,et al.  Bridging the Gap: The Role of Spatial Information Technologies in the Integration of Traditional Environmental Knowledge and Western Science , 2000, Electron. J. Inf. Syst. Dev. Ctries..

[96]  Richard P. Greene,et al.  Techniques and Methods of GIS for Business , 2005 .

[97]  S. Shrestha.  Environmental issues in Asia and the Pacific/spl minus/a perspective towards the information in decision making , 1994, Proceedings of International Conference on Expert Systems for Development.

[98]  James B. Pick.  Geographic Information Systems in Business , 2005 .

[99]  S. Cutter.  Vulnerability to environmental hazards , 1996 .

[100]  Lawrence Joseph,et al.  Similarities between Competitors and the Implications for Location Strategies , 2010, Int. J. Appl. Geospat. Res..

[101]  Jerry T. Mitchell,et al.  Revealing the Vulnerability of People and Places: A Case Study of Georgetown County, South Carolina , 2000 .

[102]  Kevin P. McKnight,et al.  Using Volunteered Geographic Information to Assess the Spatial Distribution of West Nile Virus in Detroit, Michigan , 2011, Int. J. Appl. Geospat. Res..

[103]  Laxmi Ramasubramanian,et al.  GIS Implementation in Developing Countries: Learning from Organisational Theory and Reflective Practice , 1999, Trans. GIS.

[104]  Sálvano Briceño,et al.  Building disaster‐resilient communities: The road to the second World Conference on Disaster Reduction, January 2005, Kobe, Hyogo, Japan , 2004 .

[105]  Erwan Bocher,et al.  An overview on current free and open source desktop GIS developments , 2009, Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci..

[106]  Xixi Lu,et al.  Application of GIS in flood hazard mapping: a case study of Gangetic West Bengal, India. , 2003 .

[107]  A. Troy,et al.  Application Challenges for Geographic Information Science: Implications for Research, Education, and Policy for Emergency Preparedness and Response , 1999 .

[108]  Mjs Beaumont.  Remote Sensing for Hazard Monitoring and Disaster Assessment: Marine and Coastal Applications in the Mediterranean Region , 1991 .