Cheat Sheet: ICTs for Climate Change
How can ICTs be used to combat climate change? Stan Karanasios’s paper entitled “New & Emergent ICTs and Climate Change in Developing Countries” outlines emerging ICTs in 3 steps:
- monitoring of climate change and the environment
- disaster management
- climate change adaptation
Monitoring of climate change and the environment
For developing countries to better understand their local climate and be able to anticipate climate change impacts, they must have adequate local and national observation networks, and access to the data captured from other global and regional networks.
Types of technology include:
- satellite systems
- wireless broadband technologies
- wireless sensor networks (WSN)
- mobile phones
- hand-held devices
- Rainfall and Landslide- In hilly regions of western India, SenSlide, a distributed sensor system, predicts rather than just detects landslides. Landslides occur frequently, often during the monsoon when rain causes significant damage. SenSlide makes use of WSN and strain gauges, providing data to a network.
- Fire- In South Africa, FireHawk, a forest fire system of cameras with zoom lenses and microwave transmitters and receivers was implemented in mountainous and extreme temperate locations. The system automatically detects fires, even at night, limiting the impact of damage.
- Flood- In Honduras, a WSN for flood monitoring was developed that was able to withstand river flooding and the severe stromes causing the floods, communicate over a 10,000 km river basin, predict flooding autonomously, and limit cost, allowing feasible implementation of the system.
- Impacts of Agriculture- In India a WSN-based agriculture management system named COMMON-Sense Net, was deployed to support rain-fed agriculture and provide farmers with environmental data. Wireless sensors were deployed in geographical clusters, each with one base-station that was connected to a local server via a Wi-Fi link and organized in groups, each corresponding to a particular application, such as crop modeling, water conservation measures, or deficit irrigation management.
Disaster management
Responding to natural disasters in a timely and effective manner has emerged as an important climate change theme particularly in developing countries; where in addition to the immediate crisis vulnerable communities suffer excessively from the secondary post-disaster effects that compound the tragedy. In many cases, the existing telecommunication infrastructure will be significantly or completely destroyed by an extreme weather event, and hence rapidly deployable networks and other communication services need to be employed for disaster relief operations.
Communication Methods:
- Emergency Communication Systems- In Bangladesh an Integrated Information and Communication System is underway which will use satellite, wireless broadband, mobile phones and community radio services strengthening communication links between rescue and relief units and Emergency Operation Centers (EOC).
- Rapidly Deployable Communications
- Social Networking- During Typhoon Ondoy in the Philippines in 2009, local volunteers organized and disseminated information online through websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Organizations and affected people used these sites for timely reports concerning the extent of damage, to provide information on the resources required tand to allocate relief resources.
- GIS & Other Information Systems- Visualize high risk zones; evacuation routes, shelters and the catalogue of available resource and their proximity
- Early Warning Systems- satellite radio, mobile phones, cell broadcasting system, the web, WSNs, and CAP (common alerting protocol) can be coupled with climate data for immediate and short/medium/long-term warnings to minimize harm to vulnerable communities.
Disaster Management Project Example: Project DUMBO
Climate change adaptation
To cope with current and future climate stress, communities – particularly those most vulnerable to developing countries – must build their resilience, including adopting appropriate technologies, while making the most of traditional knowledge, and diversifying their livelihoods. For instance, monitoring networks can inform habitat location (provide information to house communities away from a flood or landslide in prone areas), better agriculture (based on informed climate information or water allocation) and provide early warnings, amongst other applications. Mobile technology should be scaled-up for adaptation.
There is a lot of room for growth in developing ICTs for adapting to climate change through collecting, analyzing and disseminating information particularly in space-based systems, GIS, WSNs, wireless broadband technology, mobile technology, and soft technologies such as Web-based tools. By doing so, bottom-up local coping strategies will be encouraged.
