Earth Observation to Address Inequities in Post-Flood Recovery

Floods impact communities worldwide, resulting in loss of life, damaged infrastructure and natural assets, and threatened livelihoods. Climate change and urban development in flood-prone areas will continue to worsen flood-related losses, increasing the urgency for effective tools to monitor recovery. Many Earth Observation (EO) applications exist for flood-hazard monitoring and provide insights on location, timing, and extent in near real-time and historically to estimate flood risk. Less attention has been paid to flood recovery, even though differing recovery rates and outcomes can have immediate and enduring distributional effects within communities. EO data are uniquely positioned to monitor post-flood recovery and inform policy on hazard mitigation and adaptation but remain underutilized. We encourage the EO and flood research community to refocus on developing flood recovery applications to address growing risk. Translation of EO insights on flood recovery among flood-affected communities and decision-makers is necessary to address underlying social vulnerabilities that exacerbate inequitable recovery outcomes and advocate for redressing injustices where disparate recovery is observed. We identify an unequivocal need for EO to move beyond mapping flood hazard and exposure toward post-flood recovery monitoring to inform recovery across geographic contexts. This commentary proposes a framework for remote sensing scientists to engage community-based partners to integrate EO with non-EO data to advance flood recovery monitoring, characterize inequitable recovery, redistribute resources to mitigate inequities, and support risk reduction of future floods

Regional Index Insurance Using Satellite-Based Fractional Flooded Area

Emerging parametric insurance products targeted at regional governments consider an index of flooding as the instrument for payoff and rate setting. Inundation extent from satellite remote sensing may provide a more direct measure of flood risk in this context than hydraulic modeling of flow and inundation. Here, we examine satellite-based fractional inundated area as a proxy for flood impact that can be used for index insurance payment at a regional scale. Typical methods for estimating return periods from unbounded distributions such as the Generalized Extreme Value distribution are not appropriate for fractional flooded area, which is bounded by 0 and 1. Here we examine alternative bounded distributions (2 parameter and a 4 parameter Beta) to estimate return periods and quantify uncertainty using a bootstrap sampling procedure for the short duration satellite record of fractional flooded area. We consider two examples with distinct flood dynamics (a) a country (Bangladesh) where a flood can cover the majority of the land surface, and (b) a river basin (the Rio Salado basin in Argentina) where the worst flood covered only a modest fraction of the watershed. We explore how a parametric insurance policy based on fractional flooded area could be priced based on a typical approach used in the industry, that accounts for uncertainty for small sample estimation. Our exploratory approach to model selection illustrates how estimating the uncertainty price influences insurance contract pricing and is important to consider the choice of distribution beyond just the traditional measures of goodness of fit. © 2022 The Authors. Earth's Future published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union.Open access journalThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Not Fair Enough: Historic and Institutional Barriers to Fair Trade Coffee in El Salvador

Why do relatively few Salvadoran farmers sell to Fair Trade certified markets? This article examines the proximate and root causes that limit the participation of coffee smallholders in Fair Trade markets. Drawing upon a historical analysis of rural coffee society in El Salvador as well as Fair Trade value chains and the empirical evidence from two case studies, one in El Salvador\u27s Eastern mountains, and the second in the Western coffee growing region, this study illustrates the practical obstacles to participation in Fair Trade. It also shows how farmers are developing alternative marketing solutions such as direct trade and selling organic coffee domestically. The findings suggest that smallholders currently face at least five barriers to accessing Fair Trade, including: certification costs, economies of scale to cover coffee exports operations, stringent quality requirements and altitude constraints. However, the root causes of smallholder coffee farmers\u27 limited access to Fair Trade are rooted in decades of state-based policies and politics that have undermined rural civil society, discouraged education, perpetuated uneven access to land and debt forgiveness, and repressed the development of dynamic cooperative unions with capacity to export smallholder coffee

Updating century old Congo River navigation maps and revealing their geomorphological secrets

River transport, with more than 17,000 km of navigable channels in the Congo, is a crucial part of the economy for many of the countries sharing the river basin and allows the transport of many goods (timber, charcoal, minerals etc.) and enables access to many areas where roads do not exist. However, river transport falls short of the role it could play in development of the region and has actually declined since the Congo basin countries became independent in the 1960s. This is in part due to years of civil unrest, aging equipment, a lack of infrastructure maintenance, and the poor support and operation of public waterway agencies. River navigation maps are a specialist form of map specifically designed to allow safe navigation of river traffic such as for barges carrying cargo. Boat captains use them as they travel along the river to follow the advised navigation route and avoid hazards such as submerged rocks and shallow channels. The navigation maps for the 1,700 km of river between Kinshasa and Kisangani are issued by RVF (Régie de Voie Fluvial), the state river navigation authority, and are therefore used by all boat captains. These maps originate from the early 1900s and have not been updated since colonial times. As part of the CRuHM project we are exploring the possibility of updating these maps using modern remote sensing methods, together with RVFs experienced input. As part of the update process, RVF have provided us with detailed digital scans of the original navigation maps and we are geo-referencing these to modern geospatial projections, in line with the remote sensing data. This provides us with a unique opportunity to compare snapshots of the river system geomorphology separated by nearly 100 years. We will show the current state of the project and some of the river secrets we have discovered so far

Understanding the role of illicit transactions in land-change dynamics

Anthropogenic land use has irrevocably transformed the natural systems on which humankind relies. Advances in remote sensing have led to an improved understanding of where, why and how social and economic processes drive globally important land-use changes, from deforestation to urbanization. The role of illicit activities, however, is often absent in land change analysis. The paucity of data on unrecorded, intentionally hidden transactions makes them difficult to incorporate into spatially specific analyses of land change. We present a conceptual framework of illicit land transactions and a two-pronged approach using remotely sensed data to spatially link illicit activities to land uses

Narcotrafficking and Land Control in Guatemala and Honduras

On frontiers dominated by illicit activities such as narcotrafficking, criminal organizations’ usurpation of land and resources is profoundly changing rural livelihoods and prospects for biodiversity conservation. Prior work has demonstrated how drug trafficking catalyzes forest loss and smallholder dispossession but does not make clear the extent to which the long-term control of land is moved from state, Indigenous, or smallholders to criminal or other actors. This study attempts to describe those shifts. Specifically: we develop a typology of land control, and use it to track how drug trafficking initiates shifts from public lands and Indigenous territories to private large holdings. We examine an array of secondary sources indicating shifts in land control related to narcotrafficking, including illegal land seizure documents, news media, and surveys of land managers. In absence of formal land registries, frontier actors may signal their control over land through land use change. After establishing where changes in land control have taken place, we analyzed land use and resulting changes in spatial patterns of forest loss. We found that large scale sustained forest losses (over 713,244 ha and 417,329 ha), in Guatemala and Honduras, respectively, from 2000–2019) corresponds with areas undergoing shifts in control towards large landowners, often related to narcotrafficking. Incomplete empirical data on land control prevent comprehensive attribution of all sustained forest loss related to narcotrafficking. Yet the limited evidence gathered here indicates drug trafficking activities initiate widespread and sustained shifts and consolidation of who controls land and resources at the frontier. Our work suggests that in Central America and likely elsewhere, control over land—quite separate from property rights—is the key factor in understanding social and eco-logical change. © 2021 The Author(s).Open access journalThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

People and Pixels 20 years later:the current data landscape and research trends blending population and environmental data

In 1998, the National Research Council published People and Pixels: Linking Remote Sensing and Social Science. The volume focused on emerging research linking changes in human populations and land use/land cover to shed light on issues of sustainability, human livelihoods, and conservation, and led to practical innovations in agricultural planning, hazard impact analysis, and drought monitoring. Since then, new research opportunities have emerged thanks to the growing variety of remotely sensed data sources, an increasing array of georeferenced social science data, including data from mobile devices, and access to powerful computation cyberinfrastructure. In this article, we outline the key extensions of the People and Pixels foundation since 1998 and highlight several breakthroughs in research on human–environment interactions. We also identify pressing research problems—disaster, famine, drought, war, poverty, climate change—and explore how interdisciplinary approaches integrating people and pixels are being used to address them