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Context
HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTIONS

Three types of organisation help displaced people, namely the United Nations’ High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), bilateral agencies, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The UNHCR (or HCR) is responsible for the legal protection of refugees, mobilisation and coordination of aid, and the refugees’ repatriation once the situation is safe again. The bilateral agencies usually provide material assistance (often food). The NGOs help refugee populations meet their basic food, health, and other such needs, but they also provide longer-term educational, psychological, agricultural, environmental, and other types of support. The organisations’ responsibilities and means of action thus differ. However, the humanitarian aid organisations present in the field are usually brought to co-ordinate their actions under the UNHCR’s supervision.


Aerial photograph of Hagadera camp
DIFFERENT NEEDS
To identify the usefulness of remote sensing in this context, it is first necessary to identify the spatial information needs, which differ in line with the course of events.

Emergency phase

During the emergency phase priority is given to ensuring the people’s safety and satisfying their basic needs for food, water, and shelter. At this stage, spatial information is required to organise the relief work. Such information must be obtained as quickly as possible.

When the refugee flows are predictable and the humanitarian aid organisations have had the time and means to react, camps are set up and planned before the populations arrive. In this case, the camps are well organised. In contrast, when events get the jump on people the refugee populations plunk down wherever they can as soon as they are out of danger, and the areas that they chose may not necessarily be suitable for harbouring such concentrations of people.

 


Photograph of rectangular Bantu hut in Hagadera camp

In this case, and when safety conditions allow it, one of the humanitarian aid organisations’ first tasks will be to identify a better place for hosting the populations and to set up one or more camps on that site.

Site selection is one of the UNHCR’s responsibilities and is negotiated with the local authorities, which tend to provide marginal lands for this purpose. As a rule, 1:200,000 or 1:100,000 topographic maps exist, but they are often old and hard to get (time-consuming administrative procedures). They are usually replaced by smaller-scale road maps. The data that they provide are very fragmentary and incomplete and often old and out of date. There are few more detailed topographic or thematic maps (smaller scaled than 1:50,000) for developing countries. Site selection is thus done in the field and based on interviewing the local population.

Spatial information is also very useful for estimating the number of refugees or displaced people. This figure is of crucial importance, for it is the multiplicative factor that enables aid organisations to quantify the food, water, equipment, and other needs. There are various ways to estimate the number of people quickly. Two of them – one based on estimating the camp’s surface area, the other on counting shelters - could be used more easily if spatial information existed.

 

Consolidation phase

The emergency phase ends when the refugees have water, food, and shelter. That is when the consolidation phase starts.

A detailed map of the camp, drawn to a large scale (1:1,000-1:5,000), can then be used to re-organise the camp and locate the facilities and infrastructure (wells, latrines, dumps, cemeteries, food distribution points, storage areas, etc.). Such a map is sometimes drawn up from enlargements of (1:25,000 to 1:50,000-scale) aerial photographs or topographic maps. However, as both snapshots and maps tend to be rare, the detailed maps are primarily the result of fastidious field surveying work.
This phase also involves keeping track of changes in the population. If a refugee headcount not yet has been taken (such censuses are sometimes impossible, for reasons of security or emergency), the number of ID cards that have been handed out can be used to estimate the number of people. However, this figure is often overestimated. Several indirect methods can be used to check the validity of this estimate (number of under-fives receiving medical care, water consumption, etc.). Aerial snapshots are a source of additional estimates. When the estimates diverge too much, a census becomes indispensable.

Chronic phase
When the situation drags on, the camp becomes permanent. Spatial information then becomes necessary to monitor the camp, the population’s distribution, and the environment. This is because the camp’s infrastructure and facilities will change. New activities, such as market gardens and farming, spring up, and the population’s distribution inside the camp changes. The detailed map of the camp should be updated periodically. Keeping track of the refugee population remains a must.
Tensions between locals and refugees can also arise fairly quickly, and for many reasons. One reason is the increased competition for limited renewable resources. Because of the huge concentrations of people on marginal land, environmental degradation (deforestation, overgrazing, erosion, etc.) is often seen close to the camp. The closer one is to the camp, the worse such degradation is, but huge areas can also be affected. Unsafe conditions can make it difficult, even impossible, to work the land. Any technique that allows one to characterise environmental degradation will lighten the work in the field. Such monitoring can then be used to keep track of environmental rehabilitation programmes.