112 For a time, the displaced found themselves in obscurity, with aid organizations unable to account for their whereabouts or safety. GIS Critical to Global Response to Ukrainian Crisis UNHCR’s initial goals included setting up and managing logistics, a necessary step for a coordinated response on behalf of refugees. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), one of the United Nations bodies involved in humanitarian response, has long worked with MapAction and asked for assistance for Ukraine. MapAction’s Emergency Operations director reached out to the 80 GIS professionals on the organization’s volunteer roster to see who was available to help. “I got a phone call asking if we could send some people to Poland,” Douch said. “I sent an alert out by text to the volunteers, who then sign in and say what their availability is, or they phone me back.” Early in crisis response planning, digital maps created with GIS technology can provide answers necessary to coordinate timely and well-executed interventions. GIS technology can integrate volumes of data about geographic regions, their populations, and human movement. Frequent updates to maps give response teams near real-time awareness of changing conditions. Equally important, maps created with GIS are easy to share, which is valuable when multiple organizations need to work in tandem. MapAction Volunteers Mobilize When OCHA contacted MapAction’s operations director for help, eight staff and volunteers deployed, some of them almost immediately, heading to crisis response centers across Europe. Gemma Davies, a former MapAction volunteer and now head of Geospatial Services, was among the first of MapAction’s team to arrive, assisting teams from the World Food Programme and other organizations as they staffed a logistics cluster from a hotel conference room in Krakow, Poland. “It was about the speed that we were getting there,” Davies said. She and the volunteers helped with “a lot of that early decision-making where people have no maps and no context, and they needed to just sit down in a meeting with something in front of them. Because we were out early, we were able to get maps into people’s hands.” As the conflict in Ukraine displaced people, MapAction worked to understand where they were going.
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