Clarifying Requirements of Geo-Analysis for UN operations

UNGIS (UN Geospatial Services) is responsible of geospatial information services to the wide range of UN operations from sharing situational awareness and monitoring activities to assuring the interoperability among the UN missions, the Secretariat, and other UN agencies. Geo-analytical tools have been widely used by UNGIS experts to support UN operations. Specifically, geo-analytic tools are used to support the fulfilment of core mission mandates, to assist the senior managers in decision making process, to support planning and operations, to enhance situational awareness and so on. More UN operations using geo-analysis are listed in Table 1 (Timur 2017).

UN operations Use of geo-analysis
Situational Awareness Incident Analysis, Destruction Detection
Safety and Security Security and Threat Analysis
Military Operations and Protection of Civilians Intelligence for Early Detection of Threats
Human Rights Violation Investigation Atrocities Assessment, Mass Graves Identification
Epidemiological Analysis Epidemiological Analysis
UN Mission Support Planning for Camps’ Establishment, Management of Mission’s Utilities, Groundwater
Exploration, Water pipeline monitoring
Environmental Assessment Compliance of Rules and Regulations of Host country and UN Departmental
guidelines, Waste Management
Cross-cutting Analysis Threat Analysis of Road Operations

Situational Awareness: UNGIS provides various incident analysis products to support situational awareness and informed decision making. Due to the different natures of crisis, each mission has different requirements for incident data collection, situational awareness, and incident analysis. It is therefore required to customize analytical models. UNGIS also provides various destruction detection products in response to natural and man-made disasters to support search/rescue operations and reconstruction or to confirm the reported events. Rapid assessment of the extent and severity of natural and man-made disasters is often critical. Change detection analysis using optical/radar image is required.

Safety and Security: UNGIS provides simulation of different threat scenarios for UN Premises in the field. Each security situation on the ground requires different type of analysis and modeling tools.

Military Operations and Protection of Civilians: UNGIS provides GeoINT(Geospatial Intelligence) products for early detection of threats to support military operations and Protection of Civilians (POC). Military operations require various types and aspects of terrain and road analysis for patrol route planning, evacuation, identification of possible ambush areas, etc.. Protection of civilians requires analysis of possible threats to the population of concerned, preparedness and management of POC camps.

Human Rights Violation Investigation: UNGIS provides atrocities assessment to identify and assess the extent and severity of various atrocities and mass graves identification to detect locations of possible mass graves in conflict areas.

Epidemiological Analysis: UN responds various epidemiological crisis such as Ebola crisis. Analyzing spread, extent, occurrence, and severity depends on the type disease. Different epidemics have different spread of infection, so that the analysis and prediction of each epidemic are different. As a consequence, various analytical functions and customizable tools are required.

UN Mission Support: When UN starts a new operation, the mission support colleagues need to identify the best suitable location for a UN Camp, or IDP or Refugee camps, so that it has easy access, limited threats considering the terrain in the vicinity, sustainability during the raining season, close proximity to suitable places for helicopter landing sites, etc.. UNGIS responses to these requests by using analytical products and services such as suitability analysis, 3D feature simulation, accessibility, tracking for assets movement, helicopter landing sites, runway establishment, and detecting a location of electricity lines and optical-fiber cables damage. In various missions such as Darfur, Mali and Somalia, UNGIS provides assistance in identification of possible reserves of ground water. Analyses and processed information provides location possible locations of ground water reserves not only for the UN peacekeepers, but also for the local communities. Also, in order not to waste water in the mission, UN assists out Mission Support colleagues with monitoring and analysis of damages water pipes.

Environmental Assessment: UN has an obligation to compliance of rules and regulations published by host countries or provided by UN itself to protect environment of the area where UN serves. So it is required reductions of the footprint, facility management, water-waste management such as proper collection and disposal of waste water, biohazard materials, and etcs. UNGIS provides GIS analysis services to the Environmental Officers in the missions and the HQ which would assist them to conduct an environmental assessment.

Based on the observation of geo-analysis in UN Operations, six requirements were summarized:

  • Primitive analysis functions should be developed for both vector and raster data.
  • Customized generic analysis functions are required in a form of “building block” consisting of mission-specific geo-analysis functions since each UN operation has different requirements for analysis tools.
  • Capability is a crucial factor to build analysis models based on a specific analysis task.
  • Analysis models shall be supported by desktop and web environment.
  • It is required to provide support and research capability to the UN upon specific requests.
  • It is also necessary to conduct a research and determine a possibility to deploy analytical functions and models on hybrid model (proprietary and open source platforms)