Wednesday, September 15, 2021

Developing EO routines for humanitarian situational awareness in Cabo Delgado Province, Mozambique

Suggested/supervised by: Lorenz Wendt

Background:
In the northern province of Mozambique, Cabo Delgado, Islamic extremist armed groups started aggressive attacks on civilians in October 2017. These attacks have continued in 2021, causing insecurity and displacement within the area, food shortages, and further suffering by the backlash of government forces. An estimated 713,000 people have been internally displaced, mostly from the disputed coastal areas towards more inland regions according to estimates by UNHCR and IOM.

The conflict zone is partly considered a “no access /hard to reach area”, making it difficult to get a comprehensive overview of the situation for humanitarian actors like MSF or UN organisations. The task is therefore to leverage EO data to map the effect of the conflict on people, villages, transport infrastructure and agricultural production. Multitemporal optical imagery from Sentinel-2 and potentially Planetscope shall be used to identify abandoned villages and roads by mapping overgrowth. Newly formed settlements in the safer regions surrounding the conflict zone may be detected by bushland or forest clearing. A reduction of active cropland might indicate displacement of people and/or food insecurity. These analyses can be carried out in Google Earth Engine or other cloud processing platforms, following strategies employed also by the World Food Programme.

In addition, VHR images might be analyzed to map dwellings (tents, huts, etc) of IDPs in selected hotspot locations, for example Pemba City (MOZ). Given the breadth of EO and GI data available, the exact scope, dataset and methodology will be discussed with the MSc candidate individually.

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