In Focus EN

Figures from UNOSAT reports indicate that the humanitarian community relied on UNOSAT mapping more in 2011 than in the previous year. Since its creation in 2003 the service has been active in over 200 large crises, in 2011 UNOSAT undertook 28 rapid mapping activities. Read More

The United Nations Working Group on Emergency Telecommunications (WGET) has endorsed UNOSAT’s HumaNav Service, developed with the French partner NOVACOM Services, as a standard solution for fleet tracking and geolocation. The endorsement comes after UNOSAT launched in 2010 this new service named HumaNav, developed by researching practical solutions to the challenges of managing humanitarian fleets in the field and ensuring relief workers safety in complex operations. Read More

More than 200 attendees representing over 100 entities from the United Nations, academic fields, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector participated in the “GIS for the United Nations and the International Community” conference held in on 3-4 April the World Meteorological Organization headquarters in Geneva. Read More

March 2011, Geneva, Switzerland – The second master-level Geospatial Information training delivered by UNOSAT experts to students of the Copenhagen University in the Master of Disaster Management concluded successfully on 23 March in Geneva at the UNOSAT operations centre based at CERN. The course, elaborated by the UNOSAT Team based on the experience accumulated in-house in humanitarian rapid mapping and GIS for emergency response, is a 3-week intensive training with hands-on exercises and evaluation and it is worth 6 ECTS credits. Read More

The first operational deployment of UNOSAT light Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) took place in February in Haiti. The deployment, which included a Swinglet CAM fixed-wing aircraft and one UNOSAT specialist, was carried out in the area of Port-au-Prince in support of project activity by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The deployment was the first operational use of the new UNOSAT UAV fleet that includes fixed-wing and quadrocopter craft. Read More

11 February 2012, Geneva, Switzerland - As social media and crowd sourcing gradually become common terms in humanitarian circles, UNOSAT just rolled out yet another way to involve the general public. This is derived from cyber-science and collaborative thinking rather than typical crowd sourcing and social networking. The difference: volunteers use the internet to help out international experts and they are assigned a “mission”. Read More

2 December 2011, Hanoi, Vietnam – The first of a number of national capacity development initiatives to be implemented in South East Asia by UNOSAT took place in Vietnam in December 2011. The initiative is part of the regional cooperation arrangements set up within the UNOSAT-ADPC partnership created in 2011 to bring to countries in the region access to concrete solutions in geospatial information and satellite imagery analysis for emergency response. Read More

November 2011, Geneva, Switzerland – Since the beginning of the crisis in the Horn of Africa, UNOSAT has been requested by UN agencies to produce geospatial information derived from the analysis of very-high resolution imagery. Some of the reports produced by UNOSAT provide a detailed analysis of concentrations of IDP shelters in Mogadishu and assesses the time periods during which camp sites were formed as well as the larger settlement patterns, trends and security dynamics underlining IDP movements. Read More

October 2011, Bangkok, Thailand – This year saw the first successful roll out of the new improved version of the well-known GIS training course offered by the Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre that now includes tailored UNOSAT modules on post-disaster impact and damage analysis in emergency response mapping. The course is held once a year in Bangkok around October and lasts two weeks. The UNOSAT module is held on three consecutive days during the course. Read More

In keeping with its commitment towards community mapping, UNOSAT has joined resources with Google to make online crisis maps available for the current Thailand floods and the ongoing complex emergency and drought in the Horn of Africa. Read More

12 October 2011, Geneva Switzerland – The Symposium lined up an impressive agenda of speakers from the United Nations System, NGOs, Member States and the commercial sector gathered in Geneva to discuss the latest advancements of satellite technology and the practical innovative solutions being used today to support relief coordination in the field, human rights advocacy and more. Read More