Drones in Humanitarian Action Case Study No.8: Mapping / Natural Disaster / Protracted Situation / Camp Management
Using high resolution imagery for Camp Management in Haiti
IOM considers the use of mapping drones a helpful tool to plan shelter units and to monitor the evolution of camps. As a result, IOM has been using drones since 2012 for this purpose. An initial drone flight in Port-au-Prince in February 2012 provided figures on seven camps for persons displaced by the 2010 earthquake. The imagery was used to delimit the extent of the camps, and then to count and uniquely identify the tents within each camp. These data could then be linked to IDP data stored in the Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM). This helped establish the size of camps (as the number of tents and number of people were known), organize the camps into blocks and zones to inform registrations and operations for decision making. Background
Figure 1 Upper left: Canaan April 2013; bottom right: 3 years before
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) first used unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in Haiti for census purposes,1 but quickly recognized that UAVs could work in conjunction with the Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM), a “monitoring tool used by the Camp Coordination and Camp Management (CCCM) Cluster as a means to rapidly collect data on the earthquake affected Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) living in sites.”2 After a first flight in the area around the presidential palace where several IDP camps had been set up a few hours after the 2010 earthquake, the UAVs were used regularly for monitoring IDP campsites. Based on the resulting imagery, IOM provided “cartographic atlases of identified IDP sites which feed into the decision support tools that guide the humanitarian response as well as the transition towards return and recovery.”3 This information was shared with other actors to help in decision-making.4
1 See case study No. 7 available at drones.fsd.ch 2 UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) as Aerial Mapping & GIS platform, Updated: December 2012, contact: Vlatko Avramovski (https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B23KlWXOmZhJTkRlN2h5dmEtdWc/edit) 3 ibid 4 Sebastián Ancavil, GIS Officer at IOM, Interviewed by Audrey Lessard-Fontaine, 11 October 2015.