Geography Matters

As the two-year anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami approaches, we are reminded how important geography and GIS technology are to rescue and recovery efforts. While it realistically may take decades for the affected communities in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Thailand to recover, GIS was instrumental in the first phase after the disaster, continues to be during reconstruction, and is ensuring that communities are prepared for what may come next.

Read GIS Supports Indian Ocean Tsunami Disaster Relief to learn how GIS assisted the Indonesian government and international relief agencies in the first months after this disaster.

Today, GIS continues to prove its usefulness as the Indonesian government's reconstruction and rehabilitation agency Badan Rehabilitasi dan Rekonstruksi (BRR) NAD-Nias coordinates spatial planning, village mapping, community planning, engineering design, and house building, while also working to build sustainable GIS capacity in the region.

GIS is managed in the Province by the Spatial Information and Mapping Centre (SIM Centre), an arm of the BRR and partially funded by the Norwegian government. The SIM Centre has created an online metadata catalog, a free service available to all relief agencies in the area. The metadata catalog provides guidance and accessibility to necessary data sets and establishes confidence in the quality of the data, something lacking in the area before the tsunami.

SIM Centre employs a staff of seven. To date, SIM Centre has trained 115 people on the use of GIS, filled approximately 700 client requests for GIS data, and printed more than 2,500 maps.

Says Yakob Ishadamy, SIM Centre Manager: "The area will continue to develop well after the international aid community has left the area. GIS has a role to play by providing information to government officials and others to support their efforts. The reconstruction, economic, and social factors involved all have a time and space component. GIS provides an invaluable framework for building an information base and providing the best decision support, communication, and collaboration possible."

To learn more, read an ESRI white paper on GIS for Tsunami Recovery.