The Australasian magazine of surveying, mapping & geo-information

June/July 2014 – No. 71

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T here are few communities more at risk from the effects of climate change than those living on islands.

Surrounded by water, and with little land on which to migrate, the rising sea levels and storm surges will not only swallow villages and farmland, but will increase the risk of diseases like dengue fever as more water pools on the land.

With these risks in mind, and with scientific warnings that the future effects of climate change will be even greater than originally estimated, governments of island nations are actively creating strategies to deal with the inevitable rising waters and increase in extreme weather events.

Such planning requires information, and spatial information not only provides the necessary information to planners and ministry staff, but is also the perfect way to display this information to non-technical community members.

As part of the Australian Government’s Pacific-Australia Climate Change Science and Adaptation Planning (PACCSAP) pro-gram, a project was designed at the request of national governments that responded to the need for accurate elevation data to underpin analysis of sea level rise impacts.

Specifically, the project aimed to enhance the capacity of Pacific Islands to undertake assessments of sea-level inundation risk to key settlements and infrastructure, through the provision of critical baseline data, improved GIS capacity, and implementation of simple coastal inundation modelling.

Key to fulfilling this aim would be the delivery of: 1. High-resolution topographic,

bathymetric and aerial imagery data for coastal inundation modelling;

2. Enhanced institutional GIS capacity to support the long-term use and management of elevation data and derived products, including the capacity to undertake coastal inundation modelling and risk assessment in a GIS environment;

3. Simple coastal inundation modelling and preliminary risk assessment for priority areas;

4. Opportunities to implement more com-plex and integrated coastal modelling for more detailed risk assessment to influence coastal planning.Since 2011, such projects have been

completed on Tonga, Samoa, and Papua New Guinea. Vanuatu is the latest to receive attention from the program, and has benefitted from the insight gained by working on the other island nations.

“We learnt from each country as the project progressed,” said Dr Nathan Quadros, business development manager at the CRC for Spatial Information, which managed the project on behalf of the Australian Department of the Environment. “Before Vanuatu, we mainly dealt with GIS users within government. In Vanuatu, we wanted to increase the distribution and usage of the data, and thereby the benefits to the community.”

“A focus for the Vanuatu program was on awareness, use, and distribution of the information,” said Nathan Eaton, principal GIS consultant at NGIS Australia, which was brought in for the GIS capacity building and training. “The recent internet fibre cable connected from Fiji to Vanuatu made the use of cloud services possible, and this focus along with it.

“As an intuitive cloud-based application built from Google Earth, Google Maps Engine (GME) removes the barriers of entry to spatial information, and puts accurate mapping information in the hands of the decision makers,” said Mr Eaton. “Additionally, Google manages all of the infrastructure and software – which is designed to provide high performance and high availability – allowing Vanuatu to focus on the dissemination and use of the data and inundation models.”

For this reason, it was decided to devel-op a distributable, cloud-based product to showcase the inundation data, based on GME, to be known as Vanuatu Globe.

“Google is an ideal platform to provide greater access to the data for the community. It means people without a GIS background, such as high-level managers and ministers, can also use the data,” said Dr Quadros.

However, as any spatial user knows, the limitations to making data freely available and accessible aren’t purely technical – they’re philosophical.

A cloud in the PacificSIMON CHESTER

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“During the Vanuatu planning mission, we worked with the Vanuatu government to get buy-in and support for the concept,” said Mr Eaton. “The concept of making this extremely valuable data free, highly available and highly accessible is relatively new in the Pacific and a different way of approaching climate change awareness.”

Ultimately, the Vanuatu government saw the benefit in freeing up the data, and agreed to the distributable cloud-based solution and web services. In this particular case, Google also provided

free storage and processing time to the project, as part of its outreach program.

Starting workThe Coastal Risk Assessment Project was conducted in two phases:

Phase 1 involved the collection of high-resolution topographic and bathymetric data through LiDAR technology and aerial imagery for the priority areas of Efate, Malekula and Espiritu Santo.

“CRCSI worked with the Vanuatu govern-ment to select the priority areas for survey,” said Dr Quadros. “We also designed the LiDAR survey specifications before passing them onto Geoscience Australia, who man-aged the contract and quality assurance.”

Phase 2 involved a training program for Vanuatu Government agencies on how to use the data captured, particularly for modelling of sea-level rise impacts on assets at risk.

“The CRCSI designed the training and capacity building program, which was submitted to our partners for tender,” said Dr Quadros. “Based on the responses, NGIS was selected to complete the training and capacity building.”

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Left: As part of capacity building, NGIS held a course for teachers to help increase climate change awareness in schools.

Below: Nathan Eaton (left) and Nathan Quadros (right) with the former Vanuatu Prime Minister Moana Carcasses Kalosil (middle).

Phase 1 – LiDAR and imagery acquisitionIn the first phase of the PACCSAP project, AAM captured high-resolution topographic and bathymetric data using airborne LiDAR and coincident high-resolution aerial imagery. Due to weather restrictions, Vanuatu was gathered in two stages: the islands of Efate and Malekula were completed in October 2012, while Espiritu Santo was completed in May 2013.

Phase 2 – capacity building and trainingAs part of the capacity building, NGIS trained Vanuatu Ministry staff in how to develop the necessary inundation models from the LiDAR data.

“Using the captured LiDAR data, we derived 1m digital elevation and digital surface models, 20cm aerial photography and resulting inundation models for highest astronomical tide, and 1-in-10-year and 1-in-100-year storm events for 2030, 2055 and 2090 modelled sea-level rise,” said Mr Eaton.

In addition to this training, NGIS loaded the models and aerial imagery into the Vanuatu Globe, designed the styling and access configuration, and set up the services coming out of it for other GIS applications to plug into.

But it wasn’t just Ministry spatial staff that NGIS trained – other staff members and key community members were also shown how to access the data in Vanuatu Globe.

“During the capacity building phase for Vanuatu, we provided training for the Vanuatu Globe to ministry staff, and delivered a targeted course for Vanuatu teachers called ‘Climate Change mapping for teachers’, which used Google Earth and the Vanuatu Globe to help teachers increase climate change awareness in schools,” said Mr Eaton. “Their reaction to it was incredible.”

Indeed, reaction to the whole project has been positive, with recognition coming from governmental figures the world over.

“The sheer amount of highlights attached to this project were beyond the CRCSI’s expectations at the project’s commencement,” said Dr Quadros. “One of the biggest external highlights was having the Vanuatu Google Globe presented by Google at the White House Climate Data Initiative Announcement.”

Nathan Eaton agrees: “The Whitehouse Climate Data Initiative is focused on using technology, data, and the cloud, for climate change awareness and modelling. The Vanuatu Globe was showcased as a leading example for increasing climate change awareness.”

Closer to home, the Vanuatu training program received additional news coverage when the Vanuatu Prime Minister at the time, Moana Carcasses Kalosil, visited the GIS training room during the second train-ing tranche. “He was greatly impressed by the promotion of the project at the White House,” said Dr Quadros. “He showed a prior knowledge of the program, and was grateful for the update on the training pro-vided by Nathan Eaton from NGIS.”

The program also received significant support when Australia’s Governor Gen-eral Quentin Bryce delivered the LiDAR and aerial imagery data of Papua New Guinea to Prime Minister Peter O’Neill on behalf of the Australian Government.

Planning for the futureThe creation of the Vanuatu Globe and the datasets it contains has been invaluable for the island nation as it prepares for the coming decades.

“Since the GIS training and capacity building, a coastal risk assessment report has been prepared with input from the partner country’s training participants,” said Dr Quadros. “The report serves as an initial coastal risk assessment for high-level planning, and can be used to direct a more detailed study.

“The risk assessment reports contain coastal inundation modelling maps, initial risk assessment to infrastructure and settlements, key recommendations, and limitations of the data and analysis.”

“For Vanuatu, more ministry staff have access to software and accurate data than ever before,” said Mr Eaton. “The use of mapping to increase climate change awareness has been tremendously successful, particularly to illustrate the effects on villages.

“People understand maps – showing inundation models gives communities a tangible understanding of the challenges they face.”

Representatives from The Dept. of the Environment, CRC for Spatial Information, Google, and the Vanuatu Government will be presenting facets of the project at the Understanding Risk Forum run by the World Bank in London at the end of June. ■

Top: The Vanuatu Globe showing modelled inundation. The darker blue shows

present-day inundation of the Efate lagoon during highest astronomical tide, and the

lighter blue shows predicted inundation in 2090 due to sea level rise.

Bottom: The Vanuatu Globe also shows detailed coastal bathymetry.

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