Participatory GIS Project research

This past summer one of the Climate Centre’s Junior Researchers, Laura Canevari Luzardo conducted her master’s research (Oxford) in the Caribbean. Laura piloted a Participatory GIS project with a disaster-prone community in Grenada, and I am sending by wetransfer a summary of her dissertation. Laura used a satellite image of the area, and guided the community to mark major landmarks and areas prone to floods/landslides that were then incorporated into a final GIS map. She used the map to help the community assign levels of vulnerability to households, and manipulated the GIS to show them results of their analysis in real-time. Community members were able to request certain maps that they would like to have, to aid in disaster preparedness and response in the future. They came up with plans for how this information can be used before, during, and after a disaster.

Laura is working with the French Red Cross to develop a user manual so that this can be replicated elsewhere, using open-source GIS software. This could be an innovative and useful tool for the Climate Centre to keep in mind in our future projects, and to try it during the baseline of the Danish Urban Risk Reduction project in Nairobi (Laura has offered her support).

Laura has been a fantastic person to work with, taking initiative on this project and working independently with the community to achieve very interesting results. The Climate Centre would like to thank Laura for all her work, initiative, and creativity this summer. Laura will be moving to Southeast Asia in the future, and we hope she will keep in touch with us in her future endeavours.

Please contact us to obtain a copy of Laura’s dissertation summary.