EO Ethics for the Poor

Paper number

IAC-06-B1.5.08

Author

Dr. V. Jayaraman, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), India

Coauthor

Dr. S.K. Srivastava, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), India

Coauthor

Dr. D. Gowrisankar, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), India

Year

2006

Abstract

In the information rich society, information is generated for everything and almost for everybody. But, not enough for those continue to be deprived and poor. They are to be empowered by ‘Geospatial democracy’. This is where ethics in Earth Observation (EO)  for the poor has been envisaged. It starts from – who are those poor people? where are they located? what are their assets and vulnerability? how they could be reached out and benefited for the targeted investments/interventions?. 
Poverty analysis is often based on national level indicators using aggregate information to evaluate and monitor the overall performance of a country. The disaggregated information has been found to be crucial to design highly focused and targeted programmes addressing food security and poverty alleviation. The need for having dis-aggregated poverty maps is called for to understand better the poverty dynamics so as to improve priority setting, impact assessment and policy making. As a powerful decision support tool, dis-aggregated poverty maps allow better visualisation of spatial distribution of poverty and food insecurity, for example how much are physical isolation and poor agro-ecological endowments impediments to escape poverty. This in turn affects what type of intervention to consider. With inclusion of natural resources and environmental parameters, dis-aggregated poverty maps provide better understanding about relationships between poverty and environment, and their implications for sustainable natural resource management. 
IS based poverty analysis makes it easier to integrate the tabular data/information from various sources such as surveys, censuses, along with local level cadastral maps, and thus establishes connection among different disciplines such as social, economic and environment. It also allows switching to new units of poverty analysis, for example from administrative boundaries to ecological boundaries. EO provides detailed spatial information on natural resources and state of environment at different point of times. Poverty profiles generated using EO and GIS, helps in identifying the relevant subgroups of food insecure poor population by their distinguishing characteristics and circumstances, highlighting contextual issues and concerns. Highlighting these, the manuscript focuses on (i) some of success stories of disaggregated poverty mapping, (ii) technical issues like content and scale of mapping - a scale too small neglects the heterogeneity within each unit and provides insufficient detail for decision making, a scale too large increases the cost of compiling, managing, and analysing the data, and (iii) harnessing the advances in EO and modelling techniques to develop ‘actionable’ disaggregated poverty maps.

Abstract document

IAC-06-B1.5.08.pdf

Manuscript document

IAC-06-B1.5.08.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).

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