As the number of people displaced by disaster rises year by year (a staggering 17 million people worldwide in 2018), experts are looking at new ways to deal with the issue, writes Gareth Willmer in SciDevNet. This displacement, which occurs in the aftermath of disaster, is seen around the world in areas such as Bangladesh, a nation dealing with frequent cyclones and an estimated 10 million displaced people in the next 20 years.
A resettling project set up in 20 smaller towns aims to relieve the stresses on the city of Dhaka. “The carrot is that it will help their town grow,” Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) in Dhaka told SciDevNet.
“We’re looking at how we make these towns climate-resilient but, more importantly, migrant-friendly to enable migrants to become citizens…We talk to the mayors and the people, and I wouldn’t say we’ve convinced them all, but they’re sufficiently interested to engage.”
In Tanzania, community-mapping initiative Ramani Huria attempts to map and track flooding patterns and areas. “The initiative, run by international organisation the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), has been using drones and data from community mapping, including door-to-door surveys, to assess the position, types and material composition of buildings, roads, drainage systems and flood-prone areas, plus identify evacuation routes and safe refuges,” writes Willmer.
Other innovative approaches to displacement include the use of satellite imaging in a variety of applications, including the designation of safe routes in Bangladesh, the development of artificial intelligence to analyse this data, and user generated data to bolster findings.
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