Myanmar - Institutional Strengthening Mission

UN-SPIDER conducted a Institutional Strengthening Mission (ISM) in Myanmar from 28 March to 2 April 2017. The activity was a follow-up to the technical advisory mission conducted in March 2012, which was aimed at improving the utilization of space-based and geospatial information in all stages of disaster management. In November 2012, UN-SPIDER visited Myanmar to disseminate the report of the technical advisory mission and offered a training course on geo-informatics for disaster risk management in collaboration with the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). As a follow-up activity aimed at taking account of the progress realized since 2012, UN-SPIDER revisited Myanmar in June 2016 and held a high-level advocacy meeting of stakeholders and a training course on Earth observation technologies for landslide hazard and risk assessment.

 
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The ISM included a training programme that was jointly conducted with the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) and the Centre for Space Science and Technology Education in Asia and the Pacific in collaboration with the Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement of Myanmar; the Myanmar Engineering Society; and the Myanmar Earthquake Committee. It was hosted at Yangon Technological University and attended by 40 participants from various organizations. The training course included theory-based and interactive sessions, which covered topics such as the role of Earth observation in providing critical information and rapid mapping during and following earthquakes; visual interpretation, object-oriented segmentation and classification to facilitate change detection based on very high-resolution satellite imagery; semi-automated techniques to extract information on buildings and other infrastructure and integrating it with population and risk data to evaluate casualties and losses; crowd-source platforms to use Earth observation to perform rapid assessment; and advanced techniques to access satellite images during emergencies.