NASA Insights on Geospatial Technologies and Gender - SAR-CLIMATE

Geospatial Technologies and Gender Mainstreaming: Insights from NASA

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Amanda Markert is the Mekong Regional Science Coordination Lead for SERVIR-Mekong with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and a Research Scientist and Lecturer at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, United States of America.

Could you please tell us more about the role of geospatial technologies in gender mainstreaming?

When we look at climate change, we see that marginalized, tribal, indigenous, and lower-income communities are experiencing and are projected to continue experiencing the negative impacts and disproportionate burdens of these impacts.

Understanding these impacts and burdens are so critical to informing gender mainstreaming. With geospatial technologies and using NASA Earth observation data, we can help to identify areas where people and their risks of climate-related threats and environmental justice are located.

Identifying these issues is very helpful to ensure that everyone can mitigate these impacts and adapt to changing roles. To accomplish this, it’s critical to work across interdisciplinary communities.

By learning together, decision-makers, policymakers, Earth and social scientists can share information. When we look at what NASA and the SERVIR program are doing and using this data, we’re working with geospatial technologies and these communities to make more gender-responsive and gender-inclusive environments.

We’re doing this through a series of ways, including supporting women leaders and gender champions to create more equal opportunities within our work environments.

We’re also empowering women and girls to explore STEM fields, integrate gender considerations into our work, and bring social science and environmental justice together in big efforts such as NASA’s Earth System Observatory.

We do this by using technology to address issues of populations that are disproportionately affected, bringing into consideration gender, ethnicity, age, and social status.

It’s so important to recognize that even within climate change and disasters, two different groups will be impacted differently by climate change. This is where it’s so critical to quantify and understand those components by working across different disciplines.

FULL GEM PLATFORM

By learning together, decision-makers, policymakers, Earth and social scientists can share information.

What challenges are you currently facing in your work?

With any project and effort, we’re all running into challenges and working together to build solutions around them. Some of these big challenges include working to identify the risks of different communities and populations.

We need information from floods or hazards, for example, to understand the most affected locations. We also have access to information about the human dimension.

We mainly ask who is being affected and within what location, what are the area’s human demographics, what are the economic situations and what are the population numbers.

Having access to that information and blending it together is critical. It’s something that we’re all working together on.

Another big component here is in order to accomplish this. We need to have the technical capacity to use the data, both data on the scientific phenomenon, weather or climate, as well as the human components.

Technical capacity is also very important. We’re trying to address and mitigate this through the SERVIR-Mekong program by conducting gender analyses, gaining access to human dimension data, and understanding decision-making processes.

Understanding what the policy is about and the decision-making processes of at-risk communities is also helping build technical capacities. We do this by working hand-in-hand with different stakeholders, co-developing solutions, and training.

We’re working together to address these challenges because we definitely recognize that there are some, and there’s always an opportunity for improvement.

Looking forward, I think the big next step is that we need to get a more holistic view and better understand the risks associated with climate and disasters within Southeast Asia to help support better-informed decision-making.

Amanda Markert spoke with ADPC as part of its ‘Climate Talks’ panel discussions.

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homolata

homolata.borah@adpc.net

http://www.adpc.net

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