ESTIMATING POPULATIONS AT RISK. IN: THE GEOGRAPHICAL DIMENSIONS OF TERRORISM

Terrorism and regional conflicts have joined natural disasters and technological accidents as ubiquitous threats that can strike anywhere on earth and impact areas as large as an entire region or as small as a neighborhood, city block, or single structure. For first responders and humanitarian agencies, population estimates are essential for mission planning to determine how many emergency personnel to send, how much temporary shelter to provide, and what types and quantities of emergency supplies are needed. The first need is to estimate how many people are potentially at risk, usually before it is feasible to determine how many people actually are affected. To meet this urgent global need, dramatic progress must be made to improve methods and techniques applicable to population geography. This paper stresses the importance of geographic analysis based on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing for improving estimates of populations at risk and models of disaster scenarios using these estimates.