HAITI, 6 April – Three months after Haiti’s devastating earthquake, the humanitarian relief effort is gearing itself up for the oncoming rainy season.
Having deployed a large team of volunteers immediately after the earthquake, MapAction is still continuing to support the ongoing humanitarian situation by providing mapping and information management support within specific clusters. One of the key issues for Haitians remains that of shelter; many people are still without adequate waterproof shelter, and are living in areas which are at risk of flooding as the weather worsens. MapAction is helping the Shelter Cluster to consolidate and present information from its many partners, to aid in the identification of gaps and overlaps in provision.
Google Earth has proved itself to be a valuable tool for the dissemination of large data sets covering a wide geographic area. In order to support MapAction’s activities, Arc2Earth have donated licences for its software, an add-in for ArcGIS which facilitates the export of GIS data layers into a Google Earth format. It supports a very rich representation of multiple layers of information, and allows it to be packaged into one file for easy distribution. The Shelter Cluster are using this tool to package together a range of key geographical datasets for its cluster partners, allowing them to have a better overview of the activities of other agencies.