Screening public investment climate change projects with digital mapping platforms
At the UR2020 virtual conference, researchers from the SEC shared insights on screening public investment projects using online digital mapping technology such as the ur-scape tool.
The Understanding Risk (UR) Global Forum is a conference that convenes experts and practitioners from all around the world to showcase the best practices in the creation, communication and use of disaster and climate risk information. This year the conference is called external page UR2020 and is also the 10 year anniversary of the Understanding Risk Community.
As part of the UR2020 virtual event, Dr Jonas Joerin and Dr Wang Yi from the Future Resilient Systems programme and Michael Joos from the Future Cities Laboratory programme conducted a session presenting insights from screening institutional and public investment projects using online applied digital mapping technology.
The researchers also spoke about ur-scape, a geospatial planning support tool developed by the Singapore-ETH Centre. The session delved into why and how the tool was developed along with what the tool actually is. The ur-scape tool supports user-centric data analytics and visualization for information resilience strategies - building on a gaming technology engine. The researchers are in the process of applying the ur-scape tool in Vietnam.
The approach makes the expected footprint of a given physical infrastructure project more explicit at the upstream stage, while allowing for an overlay of a new generation of climate change risk related layers. Increasingly granular global risk layer feeds – including those leveraging satellite technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI) – are making contexts more explicit, even in relatively data-scarce developing countries.
While subject to a number of constraints and caveats, this entry point provides practical suggestions as to where planning, finance, sectoral, and sub-national authorities can already be leveraging user-friendly and cost-effective digital platforms and complementary data acquisition and validation efforts for applied decision support.
The on-demand video of the session "Getting Hotter? Screening Public Investment Projects for Climate Change Using Digital Mapping Platforms" can be viewed external page here.