Humanitarian action has rapidly adopted Earth observation (EO) and geospatial technologies shaping them according to their needs. Protracted crises and large-scale population displacements require up-to-date information in many facets of humanitarian action support, from mission planning, resource deployment and monitoring, to nutrition and vaccination campaigns, camp plotting, damage assessment, etc. Even though nearly all assets of remote sensing apply in such demanding scenarios, it remains a challenge to fully implement and sustain a trustful and reliable information service. This paper discusses achievements and open issues in the use and uptake of EO technology, from a technical and organisational point of view, motivated by an information service for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and its extension to other NGO's information needs in the humanitarian sector. With a focus on EO-based population estimation based on (semi-)automated dwelling counting from very high-resolution optical satellite imagery as well as the exploitation of data integration (including radar sensors), the paper also covers potential service elements with respect to environmental and ground-or surface water monitoring. It investigates workflow elements in relation to information extraction and delivery by illustrating a broad range of application scenarios, and discusses first operational solutions of a customized service portfolio.

The Central African Republic is one of the world’s most vulnerable countries, suffering from chronic poverty, violent conflicts and weak disaster resilience. In collaboration with Doctors without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), this study presents a novel approach to collect information about socio-economic vulnerabilities related to malnutrition, access to resources and coping capacities. The first technical test was carried out in the North of the country (sub-prefecture Kabo) in May 2015. All activities were aimed at the investigation of technical feasibility, not at operational data collection, which requires a random sampling strategy. At the core of the study is an open-source Android application named SATIDA COLLECT that facilitates rapid and simple data collection. All assessments were carried out by local MSF staff after they had been trained for one day. Once a mobile network is available, all assessments can easily be uploaded to a database for further processing and trend analysis via MSF in-house software. On one hand, regularly updated food security assessments can complement traditional large-scale surveys, whose completion can take up to eight months. Ideally, this leads to a gain in time for disaster logistics. On the other hand, recording the location of every assessment via the smart phones’ GPS receiver helps to analyze and display the coupling between drought risk and impacts over many years. Although the current situation in the Central African Republic is mostly related to violent conflict it is necessary to consider information about drought risk, because climatic shocks can further disrupt the already vulnerable system. SATIDA COLLECT can easily be adapted to local conditions or other applications, such as the evaluation of vaccination campaigns. Most importantly, it facilitates the standardized collection of information without pen and paper, as well as straightforward sharing of collected data with the MSF headquarters or other aid organizations.

Governments, aid organizations and researchers are struggling with the complexity of detecting and monitoring drought events, which leads to weaknesses regarding the translation of early warnings into action. Embedded in an advanced decision-support framework for Doctors without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières), this study focuses on identifying the added-value of combining different satellite-derived datasets for drought monitoring and forecasting in Ethiopia. The core of the study is the improvement of an existing drought index via methodical adaptations and the integration of various satellite-derived datasets. The resulting Enhanced Combined Drought Index (ECDI) links four input datasets (rainfall, soil moisture, land surface temperature and vegetation status). The respective weight of each input dataset is calculated for every grid point at a spatial resolution of 0.25 degrees (roughly 28 kilometers). In the case of data gaps in one input dataset, the weights are automatically redistributed to other available variables. Ranking the years 1992 to 2014 according to the ECDI-based warning levels allows for the identification of all large-scale drought events in Ethiopia. Our results also indicate a good match between the ECDI-based drought warning levels and reported drought impacts for both the start and the end of the season.

Natural disasters, changing environmental conditions, and violent regional conflicts are main drivers for population displacement. Worldwide, more than 50 million people are displaced. One tragic example of huge displacement due to a conflict situation is the Republic of South Sudan, where 1.7 million people have been forced to flee their homes since December 2013. Most of them found refuge in numerous spontaneous settlements, either camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) within the country, or refugee camps in neighbouring countries. In such crisis situations, humanitarian organisations often do not have access to the areas and only have vague information on the location and amount of affected population. Using very high resolution (VHR) satellite imagery, rumours about displaced people can be generally verified or falsified, while for areas where displaced people gather, information on amount and spatial distribution of dwellings can be extracted for population estimates. Such information assists in planning services like health care or vaccination campaigns and planning of needed infrastructure like boreholes, latrines or hospitals. Camps in the setup and construction phase are often highly dynamic and require regular monitoring. Beyond this emergency phase, specific information is also requested by organisations involved in camp management in all other phases of humanitarian crisis response, i.e. in the care and maintenance phase, as well as the repatriation phase.

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