- (Credit ECHO/Raimundo)
- (Credit ECHO/Raimundo)
The major natural disasters (hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, forest fires, volcanic eruptions, etc.) that strike our planet every year cause heavy damages and many human casualties.
In such situations, where every minute gained can save lives, rescue teams must operate rapidly and efficiently. In particular, they must be able to identify as quickly as possible where intervention should be concentrated and how to arrive on spot. They must also determine where rescue infrastructures (e.g. medical units) can be deployed and identify secure areas for temporarily hosting homeless people.
In case of major earthquakes or floods for instance, the context in which these decisions are taken can be made even more challenging by the fact that existing maps have suddenly become out of date, due to dramatic changes in the road accessibility.
As recently illustrated by the relief operations that followed the major 7.0-magnitude earthquake that struck the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince and its neighborhoods on 12 January 2010, rescue teams need to be provided with a rapid mapping capacity in order to:
- Identify affected areas;
- Assess damages;
- Assess accessibility;
- Locate spontaneous people gatherings;
- Determine secure vs. risky areas (e.g. in case of an aftershock for an earthquake or an extension of a flooded area).
Two days after the earthquake in Haiti, Catherine Ashton (High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy) declared during a press conference: "We are now putting all the different elements together that are at our disposal: Humanitarian relief, civil protection, but also other instruments [such] as satellite images provided by our Global Monitoring System (GMES) that are important for the coordination of the UN efforts on the ground."
In the days that have followed the earthquake, GMES has indeed provided several Civil Protection Authorities (French and German) as well as international or non governmental associations (e.g. United Nations Division of Field Support, United Nations World Food Programme, Spanish Red Cross) with rapid mapping.
Practically, two different GMES services were solicited in the aftermath of this major disaster: the GMES Emergency Response Service developed by the SAFER project and the GMES Security Service developed by the G-MOSAIC project. Both were activated on 14 January 2010.
Here are some examples of the products delivered by these two projects: