{"id":293342,"date":"2020-01-15T06:13:39","date_gmt":"2020-01-15T14:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=blog&#038;p=293342"},"modified":"2025-05-08T20:00:01","modified_gmt":"2025-05-09T03:00:01","slug":"rohingya-migration-drone-mapping","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/blog\/rohingya-migration-drone-mapping","title":{"rendered":"Relief Workers Rely on Drone Imagery to Help Bangladesh Refugee Camp"},"author":941,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[141,165662,209192,405812],"industry":[],"esri-blog-category":[478762],"esri_blog_department":[478192],"class_list":["post-293342","blog","type-blog","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mapping","tag-drones","tag-migration","tag-refugee","tag-rohingya","esri-blog-category-humanitarian-response","esri_blog_department-gis-for-good"],"acf":{"video_source":"","video_start":"","video_stop":"","short_description":"Daily drone flights have helped improve safety and services to the Rohingya refugees forced from Myanmar.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Right","content":"Key Takeaways\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Relief workers use drone imagery to map changing conditions in the Rohingya refugee camp.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>With regularly refreshed maps, NGOs improve safety and services for refugees.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Maps help address the dangers of monsoon flooding, landslides, and elephant migration.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>","snippet":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"The region of Bangladesh near the Bay of Bengal known as Cox\u2019s Bazar poses an unlikely candidate for a spontaneous metropolis. The country has the second-highest rate of disasters in Asia and the Pacific with conditions that include heavy monsoon rains, flooding, and landslides. Because of its coastal location, Cox\u2019s Bazar also endures cyclones.\r\n\r\nYet, since 1991 Cox\u2019s Bazar has been a refuge for the Rohingya people fleeing neighboring Myanmar. As a Muslim minority group in a predominantly Buddhist country, the Rohingya have endured decades of ethnic and religious persecution.\r\n\r\nIn August 2017, Burmese security forces launched massive attacks on predominantly Rohingya areas of Myanmar. In one of the largest forced migrations in modern history, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya left their homes on foot and crossed the border to Bangladesh. Many made their way to the Kutupalong Balukhali camp.\r\n\r\nPrior to the influx, Kutupalong Balukhali and camps in Teknaf housed around 200,000 people. Within weeks, the population ballooned to 500,000. It quickly became one of the world\u2019s most densely packed refugee camps in a resource-scarce country that already has some of the world\u2019s densest living conditions.\r\n\r\nThe population increase created enormous logistical challenges for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which works with the Bangladeshi government and UNHCR to administer the camps. In particular, IOM staff are challenged in the\u00a0region\u2019s rainy season that spans the months of June through September. Nearly one-third of the camp\u2014including one-quarter of its latrines and nearly half of its hand pumps for water\u2014is at risk for flooding and landslides. Heavier rainfall also correlates with increased health risks."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":293392,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<strong>Using Drones to Map the Unmappable<\/strong>\r\n\r\nThe overarching need for workers at IOM and in the Bangladeshi government was to visualize the camp\u2019s extent. Getting a sense of how\u2014and how many\u2014people were transforming Kutuapalong could help answer questions about how to accommodate them. City planners require maps with detailed information about land, population, and infrastructure. The new Kutupalong Balukhali was a cartographic blank slate.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhen I was deployed in September, there was no clear visual representation of the extent of the camp,\u201d said Sebastian Ancavil, international mission and geographic information system officer at IOM. \u201cWe were in the dark, because even a month after the exodus, nobody had good information about the situation. That\u2019s why we requested to have a drone fly over it.\u201d\r\n\r\nUnmanned aerial vehicles\u2014commonly known as drones\u2014are used for many situations that require aerial surveilling, from forest fires to power lines. For the Kutupalong Balukhali project, a drone alone proved insufficient. Doing the job right would require additional technology.\r\n\r\nAncavil\u2019s professional specialty is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/en-us\/what-is-gis\/overview\">geographic information systems (GIS)<\/a> software that organizes geographically-specific data onto digital maps. For Ancavil and his team, a drone with GIS capabilities provided the first comprehensive view of Kutupalong Balukhali\u2019s ongoing transformation.\r\n\r\nBefore drones became a viable option, Ancavil employed GIS for similar purposes. After a devastating earthquake hit Haiti in 2010, he used satellite imagery to monitor rebuilding efforts in Port-au-Prince. The accelerated pace of this rebuilding meant that the imagery was often outdated before it became available.\r\n\r\nAlthough GIS technology was more limited at that time, Port-au-Prince was an established urban area with preexisting maps that provided a baseline of information to assess earthquake damage. Kutupalong Balukhali presented the opposite challenge as no maps existed of the quickly created community. Haiti provided the laboratory to create the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/en-us\/arcgis\/products\/imagery-remote-sensing\/drone-mapping\">drone mapping<\/a> approach. \u201cIn Haiti, we went from nothing to something,\u201d Ancavil said of the technological innovations to create up-to-date maps. \u201cFor Bangladesh, the technology and methodology were there, but there were no existing maps.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":293382,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<strong>Making Drones Smart<\/strong>\r\n\r\nMapping Kutupalong Balukhali involved a third technology, artificial intelligence (AI), to augment GIS data. The addition of AI gives today\u2019s GIS the ability to automatically and quickly process complex imagery. The drone imagery\u2014combined with map data from OpenStreetMap and other partners<span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">\u2014<\/span>could be programmed to recognize and categorize geographic features, including buildings, human-made objects, vegetation, and soil. (To alleviate privacy concerns, the drone is flown at an altitude too high to capture recognizable images of individuals.)\r\n\r\nThese rich images give Kutupalong Balukhali camp administrators a comprehensive view of the area\u2019s ad hoc structure. Kutupalong Balukhali is subdivided into 23 smaller camps, each containing around 1,500 blocks, with around 100 families per block. Every block has a community leader who represents the block and communicates its needs, including food, education, and security.\r\n\r\nThis information becomes part of the GIS database, along with a community leader\u2019s rough population count, which lets relief workers visualize the density of a block. \u201cWe draw small polygons on the map so that it\u2019s easier for a community leader to give information that helps our field team assess the block,\u201d Ancavil said."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":293372,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<strong>Capturing a Changing Landscape<\/strong>\r\n\r\nThe combination of drone imagery, GIS, and AI also helps workers understand the land the camp occupies. An influx this large involves \u00a0massive environmental upheaval. Thousands who fled with nearly nothing were forced to grab bamboo and other materials for shelter, causing deforestation that exacerbates existing environmental challenges. The camp expansion even impacted elephant migration routes, yet another danger camp residents face.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe can remove all the human construction from the map,\u201d Ancavil explained. \u201cThen you\u2019re left with just the ground surface, which lets us provide a digital terrain model to partners who calculate landslide risk and flood modeling.\u201d\r\n\r\nBesides mapping the camp and helping site planning and development, the use of GIS for Kutupalong Balukhali provides a platform for a broad range of data about people and place pertaining to the camp. With mobile devices, relief workers from UNICEF and other agencies, can access various cloud-based datasets. \u201cWe are a data provider,\u201d Ancavil explained. \u201cWe share the information with our partners, through the <a href=\"https:\/\/data.humdata.org\/search?q=iom+drone&amp;ext_search_source=main-nav\">Humanitarian Data Exchange<\/a> (HDX) platform for example, and they can take whatever they need to do their work.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe estimated population of Kutupalong Balukhali and satellite camps that have formed around, including those in Teknaf, now hovers around 900,000. As ongoing drone flights provide bird\u2019s-eye-views of the camp, the new data provides ground-level context. The result is a living document that evolves with the camp.\r\n\r\nThe drone also had the unexpected effect of providing an outlet for childhood fascination. \u201cI had a group of kids follow me on the first mission,\u201d Ancavil said. \u201cI didn\u2019t understand them, and they didn\u2019t understand me, but they stayed with me all day.\u201d\r\n\r\n&nbsp;\r\n\r\nLearn more about how location intelligence <a href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/en-us\/solutions\/industries\/sustainability\/humanitarian\">focuses and prioritizes relief missions<\/a>."},{"acf_fc_layout":"storymap","title":"","description":"View the story map below from UNHCR for more details and context about the Rohingya refugee camps.","storymap_url":"https:\/\/unhcr.maps.arcgis.com\/apps\/Cascade\/index.html?appid=5fdca0f47f1a46498002f39894fcd26f"}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.9 (Yoast SEO v25.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ 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