18 H U M A N I TA R I A N G I S UN Uses GIS to Promote Peace and Provide Aid continued from cover Highlights „ UN maintains worldwide geodatabase to support highly sensitive and important decision making. „ GIS specialists lend support to UN field missions. „ Enterprise GIS supports Web-enabled application for sharing and situational awareness. supporting those who work in departments and offices within the UN Secretariat so they can provide essential security for millions of people, as well as fragile institutions, emerging from conflict and recovering from humanitarian emergencies. Providing Geographic Knowledge The UN Cartographic Section (UNCS) is at the core of the UN Secretariat’s geospatial initiatives. The UNCS staff provides geographic visualization to the Security Council sessions, analysis for the Department of Peacekeeping Operations and Department of Political Affairs, and cartographic support for the secretary-general reports. UNCS is also in charge of the GIS program of peace operations, managing GIS offices in 13 peacekeeping and political missions. Other information management teams, such as the GIS officers and cartographers in the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), collaborate with UNCS to further extend the reach of GIS. Throughout the UN, decision makers rely on geographic information products to support highly sensitive and important decision making. GIS data and analysis are used for boundary delimitation and demarcation, field mission planning and operations, humanitarian intervention, logistics, resource allocation, and critical analysis and visualization for situational awareness and security. GIS officers are assigned to most UN field missions (both peacekeeping and political), resulting in a robust enterprise capability whereby the UN is making a great impact on building peace and stabilizing operations. With enhanced geospatial abilities, improved operations have allowed the peacekeepers, humanitarian response teams, and other UN partners to operate with more actionable information in the field and achieve greater success. UNCS and other GIS teams within the UN Secretariat in New York City, New York, and in the field provide substantial GIS support to the decision makers, political analysts, information managers, and Security Council members, as well as operational GIS support, for mission planning, demining, peacekeeping, and humanitarian operations. Defining Boundaries Establishing boundaries between countries is a prerequisite for peaceful neighboring relations. UNCS has been involved in many projects related to delimitation and demarcation between member states so that all parties have a clear understanding of their sovereignty limits. Using GIS, the UN has facilitated the definition of the Cameroon-Nigeria, Eritrea-Ethiopia, Iraq-Kuwait, Israel-Lebanon, and Turkey-Greek Cyprus boundaries. With the UN International Boundary Information System (UNIBIS) project, UNCS is working to create and subsequently maintain a worldwide geodatabase on international boundaries. It will depict, as accurately as possible, their geometry, status, claims, dates of treaty agreements, and reference materials. The boundary geodatabase uses authoritative sources of information, such as treaty maps, coordinates, rulings, treaty text, and interpreted satellite imagery. Developed by UNCS in consultation with other international experts on boundaries, UNIBIS highlights potential conflict areas to support conflict prevention activities and enhance readiness for assistance on boundary demarcation issues. Developing Peace and Security Peacekeepers deploy to war-torn regions where no one else is willing or able to go and prevent conflict from returning or escalating. Since the organization’s inception, UN peacekeepers have undertaken 63 field missions, which, among many other things, enabled people in dozens of countries to participate in free and fair elections and helped disarm more than 400,000 ex-combatants in the past decade alone. In response to a recommendation in the Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, GIS is now part of the UN peacekeeping Rapid analysis performed by the UN Cartographic Section and partners produced this damage assessment map of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, within days of the February 2010 earthquake (Map No. 4378 Rev. 1, courtesy UN Cartographic Section).