Resilience at Home: How Open Data and Maps Make a Difference
Data for Good:
Insights from Open Geospatial Data
Dear John
Resilience at home starts with understanding the risks around us. From mapping flood-prone areas and documenting environmental challenges to generating detailed imagery for urban planning, open data and community mapping help people better understand their surroundings and identify where action is needed.
In this edition, we explore how community-generated data is supporting disaster preparedness, informing local planning and helping communities turn local knowledge into action.
Open Data for Disaster Preparedness
How can communities use data to prepare for disasters before they happen?
The Open Data for Community-Based and Anticipatory Risk Managment in Columbia initiative demonstrates how open mapping and community-generated information can help communities identify risks and strenghthen preparedness
By bringing local knowledge and geographic data together, communities and local stakeholders can build a clearer understanding of the hazards they face and use that information to inform anticipatory action.
When Maps Make Early Warnings Actionable
An isolation risk and resilience map of Mapai, Mozambique, showing flood extent, road accessibility, buildings and essential services to help identify communities at risk of being cut off during flooding.
Early warnings are most effective when people have the information they need to understand risks and act on them. In Mapai, Mozambique, mapping flood extent, road accessibility and essential services helps identify communities that could become isolated during a flood.
By connecting hazard information with the places people live and the services they depend on, maps can support preparedness and help decision-makers plan how to reach vulnerable communities.
Mapping Cities for Greater Resilience
Reliable, up-to-date geographic data can help cities better understand their infrastructure and environmental challenges.
Through the remapping of Freetown’s Central Business District, local mappers collected detailed information about buildings, commercial activity, roads and drainage networks. The resulting data revealed important characteristics of the district and can help inform waste collection planning, flood-risk assessment and urban planning.
Better information about the places where people live and work can help decision-makers identify needs, plan improvements and strengthen urban resilience.
Make Your Imagery Count with OpenAerialMap
OpenAerialMap has introduced an updated website and uploader to make contributing aerial imagery easier. The new uploader supports resumable uploads and richer metadata, helping contributors share imagery with the wider mapping community.
Whether you're sharing drone imagery or looking for existing datasets, OpenAerialMap helps make openly licensed geospatial imagery more accessible for mapping, planning and humanitarian work.
Building Open GeoAI for Humanitarian Response
How can AI models better support humanitarian mapping? In this podcast, Petya Kangalova and Kshitij Sharma discuss the development of open GeoAI models, the importance of community-generated training data, and why human validation and locally relevant data matter.
The conversation explores how initiatives such as fAIr can help connect GeoAI developers with open mapping communities and make AI more useful in humanitarian contexts.
Want to explore further? Watch the fAIr platform demonstration to learn more about its model catalogue, metadata and workflows for deploying and adapting models.
Listen to the podcast and watch the fAIr demo on YouTube.
Contribute GeoAI Models to fAIr
Do you develop open-source GeoAI models that identify features in high-resolution satellite or aerial imagery? HOT's fAIr initiative is inviting contributions to expand access to models that can support humanitarian mapping.
Potential applications include identifying buildings, critical infrastructure, water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) facilities, transport networks and other features relevant to humanitarian response.
Selected contributors can receive funding, feedback from the mapping community and opportunities to help improve open datasets. Application closes on 31 December 2026.
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This newsletter was written and curated by Ibrahim Fatai. Jessie Pechmann,
Claudio de los Reyes and Mar Marín Villagrana contributed as editors.
