Building Exposure Maps of Urban Infrastructure and Crop Fields in the Mekong River Basin

The World Bank is currently implementing the Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) Project in the Lower Mekong Basin to establish examples of and mainstream the best IWRM practices in the region. One of the key objectives is to support disaster risk management to address naturally occurring hazards such as floods, flash floods as well as droughts. With climate change they are expected to become more frequent and less predictable in this area posing additional risk to people inhabiting flood prone plains which are often one of poorest rural communities relying on seasonal rains and the natural flooding of low-land croplands for rice cultivation. As a part of disaster resilience strategy in the Mekong Basin the Bank proposed a suite of disaster resilience tools including risk management information platform as well as a multi-hazard open-source modeling tool for probabilistic risk assessment. In this context, EO data was used to demonstrate the added value of satellite remote sensing to characterize the types of hazards occluding in the basin (floods) and their variability (droughts), and to building up the inventory of exposed assets. The study was piloted over the selected areas in Cambodia, however as currently such geospatial data is not widely available for the Mekong region, a particular emphasis was put on the scalability of this approach to the entire basin (including Vietnam and Laos).

Technical Officer: Philippe Bally

Starting Date: 2011-01-01

Suppliers:
GeoVille Information Systems GmbH as supplier - prime

Users:
World Bank as user - buyer
Mekong River Comission as user - partner/collaborator
National Committee for Disaster Management as user - partner/collaborator

Services:
urban area location and type mapping (Urban)
crop type and acreage mapping (Agriculture)