Humanitarian crisis-mapping technology

Crisis-mapping technology has emerged in the past five years as a tool to help humanitarian organizations deliver assistance to victims of civil conflicts and natural disasters.

Crisis-mapping platforms display eyewitness reports submitted via e-mail, text message, and social media. The reports are then plotted on interactive maps, creating a geospatial record of events in real time. Once these reports are manually collated, they became a live crisis map of urgent humanitarian needs. For example, the map could show exactly where victims lay buried under the rubble of collapsed buildings, and where medical supplies needed to be delivered.

After the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011, eyewitnesses and other observers posted more than 300,000 tweets every minute during the disaster and its aftermath. In the fall of 2012, Hurricane Sandy struck the eastern seaboard of the United States, eliciting more than 20 million tweets.

The pioneers behind the first wave of crisis-mapping technology were typically gifted hackers from the dynamic open-source community. Creating the next generation of these technologies will require additional skills in data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and social computing.

Welcome to the world of big (crisis) data, in which disaster-affected locations are increasingly becoming digital communities, thanks to the proliferation of social media and smartphones.

[Forbes]

The Year’s Most Forgotten Humanitarian Crisis

While the world fixated on Ukraine and Syria, a near-genocide ripped through central Africa, to little international fanfare.

It’s been two years since unimaginable violence broke out in the Central African Republic, and yet so few have noticed the near-genocide ravaging the little-known country. The downward spiral began in early 2013, when a majority-Muslim group of rebels seized control of the country and began a campaign of killing and looting. This led to the formation of a Christian militant group to counter the rebels, and all-out sectarian violence exploded.

Watchdog groups warn of ongoing ethnic cleansing and hint that what happened in nearby Rwanda exactly 20 years ago could again come to pass. A team from Human Rights Watch found that the French soldiers “seemed stunned by the violence” upon arriving in the war-torn country. The streets of the capital of Bangui were littered with cut up bodies and Muslims hanging from lynching ropes—an estimated 100 people were being killed daily. “At the scenes of the most brutal lynchings in Bangui, we often found small children among the spectators, watching human beings being cut apart.”

This hasty outside intervention slowed the crush of violence, but there’s still fear that the precarious country could be sent over the tipping point at any moment—and the world would barely notice.

“CAR is not well known by the international community—they don’t know if it is a region of Africa or if it is a country,” says Souleymane Diabaté, the head of UNICEF in Central African Republic.

But there’s the possibility that CAR might usher in peace—even while few are paying attention.

“If I had to summarize in one word what inspires me on December 30, 2014, that word would be ‘hope,’” Babacar Gaye, head of the UN mission in CAR, said at a Tuesday press conference in the capital.

[The Daily Beast]

Geneva Convention signatories call on Israelis and Palestinians to respect humanitarian law

26 countries that are signatories of the Geneva Convention examined the question of the protection of civilians in the Palestinian-occupied territories, and signed a ten-point declaration reaffirming the obligations of both Israelis and Palestinians under the international humanitarian law.

Negotiated in the aftermath of World War II and ratified by 196 countries, the Geneva Conventions and their additional protocols lay down the standards of international humanitarian law in time of war and occupation. They aim to limit the barbarity of war and protect those who do not take part in the fighting (civilians, medics, aid workers) and those who can no longer fight (wounded, sick and shipwrecked troops, prisoners of war), the International Committee of the Red Cross explains on its website.

On July 8, 2014, Israel launched an offensive on Gaza with the declared aim of halting cross-border rocket salvoes by Hamas. During this offensive Israeli strikes killed more than 2,000 people in the Gaza strip, according to the United Nations the majority being civilians.

The recent declaration does not create new obligations but reiterates some, such as the “need to fully respect the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law”, to prohibit “indiscriminate” and “disproportionate” attacks, the targeting of civilian objects, such as schools, or placing military objective in the “vicinity of civilians and civilian objects”. The text also emphasizes the signatories’ “deep concern” about “the impact of the continued occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory and the closure of the Gaza strip”. The signatories ”reaffirm the illegality of Israeli settlements.”

Swiss ambassador Paul Fivat told reporters, “This is a signal and we can hope that words count, and the parties will be, again, reminded of their obligations.”

The meeting was harshly criticized by Israel, who boycotted it, as did other nations such as the United States and Canada, which could limit its impact.

[The Jerusalem Post]

Syria’s humanitarian catastrophe about to get worse

As civil war in Syria inches toward its four-year anniversary, the nation’s humanitarian catastrophe deepens.

Some 7.6 million Syrians are now internally displaced, and another 3.3 million have fled to neighboring countries to avoid the complex three-way dogfight among Assad’s forces, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and Syrian rebels.

In Lebanon the influx of one million refugees is straining the capacities of a country of only 4.4 million.

Today, some 12.2 million Syrians, both inside and outside Syria, rely on emergency food aid. It thus came as a shock when the UN’s World Food Program (WFP) announced on December 1 that a lack of funds was forcing it to suspend aid to help feed and clothe Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt.

The cutback is projected to hit 1.7 million Syrian refugees. Many have signaled that their best option now may be a journey back to war-torn Syria. Unless funds are found quickly, Syria’s “new level of hopelessness” might rise to new heights.

[Council on Foreign Relations]

Central African Republic humanitarian crisis among world’s worst

The situation in the Central African Republic remains one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, the United Nations refugee agency warned today, with more than 187,000 refugees having fled to neighboring countries over the last year, bringing the total number of refugees and internally displaced people over 850,000, about a fifth of the country’s entire population.

The figure was half a million less than at the end of December 2013, after Bangui was captured by the anti-Balaka militia, an event that triggered fresh violence and displacement according to UNHCR. Insecurity quickly degenerated into chaos, displacing close to 1 million people inside the country and across borders and prompting the entire UN system to respond to the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian crisis.

“The one-year anniversary of the conflict marks one year that children have been out of school, a year of learning lost, and a year of their lives scarred and shattered,” said Sarah Crowe of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

UNICEF launched a campaign in November that aimed to help return hundreds of thousands of children to school after the deterioration in the security situation forced many teachers and students to flee.

The “Back to School” initiative aimed to help a total of 662,000 children to resume their studies, and UNICEF is delivering “school in a box” kits that contain essential equipment, such as exercise books and pencils, and school backpacks, to enable children to resume their educations. Currently, 300,000 children were reported back in school, a significant step that has had “a ripple effect throughout the whole community and lent a sense of momentum and optimism.”

[UN]