From Curious Minds Come Helping Hands

    The Challenge

    Your challenge is to design and build an innovative platform to integrate satellite data and information about vulnerable populations and environmental hazards in order to identify the most at-risk populations. Be creative and think outside the box. How will you identify those people that are often missed, but need aid the most?

    Background

    The World Health Organization estimates that approximately 25% of human death and disease globally is linked to environmental hazards, and this increases to 35% in particularly vulnerable regions like sub-Saharan Africa. Vulnerability is driven by environmental, social, economic, and physical factors. For example, children and the elderly and those considered socioeconomically disadvantaged can be at greater risk of harm from environmental hazards. These hazards are wide ranging and can include single hazards such as cyclones and earthquakes, or more complex and cascading hazards, such as famine linked to drought, crop failure and population imbalances, or landslides and flash floods impacting development in insecure locations.

    These regional variations in risk are driven by the overlap of increased likelihood of environmental hazards and increased presence of vulnerabilities. It is often in these locations where information about environmental and human conditions is most critical, that these data are the most difficult to obtain. Satellite data are often used to fill this data gap to provide timely and accurate information to support the decisions of humanitarian and development organizations that work to aid these communities.

    Potential Considerations

    Your solution should:

    • Be tailored to a specific environmental hazard vulnerability faced by a particular region, or based on global environmental hazards that make it scalable to any location.
    • Be easy to understand by someone without expertise in remote sensing or humanitarian work. Creativity (and accuracy!) in how you display your data is often just as important as how you analyze your data.
    • Consider that users may be interested in not just where all people are, but more focused on youth and gender issues (ex. girls under the age of 13).

    A few data resources to get you started are listed on the side, but be creative in what data you include to best solve the issue you are working on!