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Policymakers, researchers and scientists—and, often without realizing it, the general public—have turned to GIS technology to protect our economies, ensure equity and save lives.
If you’re managing a complicated project, like improving a community’s access to clean water, helping people recover from disasters or spending hundreds of billions of federal dollars, one thing you'll need is a good map.
John Podesta, White House adviser on clean energy innovation and implementation, shapes how the administration disburses an historic pile of tax credits and incentives under a landmark climate law. At the February 2023 Esri FedGIS Conference, a confab of thousands of government employees and mapping specialists sharing and learning how the federal government leverages geographic information systems (GIS) to solve complex issues, Podesta said mapping “intersects almost on a daily basis with being able to visualize where investments are going across the country, and trying to imagine and develop a program that is going to be future-proof.”
GIS, which gathers and plots geospatial data on dynamic maps, helps a range of users—like the White House, the NAACP, Civil Air Patrol and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—better understand the world, communicate and take action.
Assistant secretary of the Navy Meredith Berger discusses the value of ArcGIS technology during a conference session.
Esri president and founder Jack Dangermond speaks about the power of visualizing data at the plenary session.
Assistant secretary of the Navy Meredith Berger discusses the value of ArcGIS technology during a conference session.
Climate spending
Mapping billions in climate spending
In Washington, officials are trying to direct investment to new projects like hydrogen plants and charging stations, with an emphasis on the communities most in need of support. Ensuring the funds are spent wisely—and that the United States meets its goal of 50 percent greenhouse gas reductions by 2030—is a staggering challenge. This task involves orchestrating efforts at more than a dozen federal agencies, enlisting support across the political spectrum and engaging with numerous groups on the local level. "The key is working together,” Podesta said.
GIS-based tools like the Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation, a new dashboard of climate-related data drawn from a dozen agencies, are helping this diverse team of stakeholders coalesce by establishing a common language.
Specifically, Podesta pointed to GIS as a critical tool for identifying and supporting communities that have historically been forgotten by federal investment. “There's definitely a direction,” he said, “towards not building on an economy that puts a lot of heavy burden on disadvantaged communities, on communities of color.”
The administration is “learning the lessons of the past, where we…didn't pay enough attention to what was happening at the community level from other great economic changes in this country." The “exercise of mapping” is helping, he said, “to not leave people behind.”
Racial equity
Mapping stronger communities
As Washington searches for places to invest, local communities are trying to ensure future funds end up where they are needed most. Increasingly, that means literally putting those places—and their data—on the map.
“We have to be able to show, track, map, where those funds are going and how they're actually impacting and benefiting the community,” said Jamal Watkins, national senior vice president of strategy and advancement at the NAACP. Maps are central to a range of NAACP’s public data hubs—about voting, police funding, lifespan, livelihood and health—and engage communities and policymakers in crafting more sustainable, place-based responses.
In cities like Houston, where a spate of infrastructure failures have forced residents to boil their tap water, the NAACP uses maps to better explain infrastructure vulnerabilities and spot future risks from natural disasters. “Literally, you can sit in a room and say, ‘Oh, let's look at these data overlays, here's the problem, and here's a solution or a set of solutions,’” said Watkins.
If we can compile location data, guide planning and decision-making in a way that is focusing in on racial justice, then it allows for us to understand how to move resources that that matter the most and measureimpact. An example of that is voter protection. And so we launched a voter protection hub this fall because we have been doing voter protection work for decades. But what you see is there are hotspots where voters have barriers to being able to cast an unfettered ballot, and those hotspots end up being heavily racialized. And so if you look at a specific geography through the hub on Election Day, for example, folks fill out a form, and they’re complainingeither, ’They’ve, you know, they’ve lost my address, I’m not in the voting rolls or I’m being told I can’t vote or I feel intimidated because there’s someone outside yelling or there’s a police force here. And I’m not sure if violence is taking place." We get that data in real time and it’s a heat map that gets generated, and then the lawyers descend and the volunteers descend and we resolve those issues. And what you end up with is helping thousands of folks in real-time who have voting issues.
Watkins traces the group's geographic work back to cofounder W.E.B. Du Bois, who used maps and infographics to illustrate the imprints of injustice. “He understood that geography mattered," he said. "And depending upon where you live, the gift or the curse of being born a certain race or ethnicity is greater."
Maps also have distinct advantages in today’s polarized political climate, said Patrice Willoughby, NAACP's vice president of policy and legislative affairs, because they establish a baseline of understanding that politics can’t deny.
“GIS is such an important tool,” she told a packed session at FedGIS on mapping equity. “It's more difficult to ignore constituents when they're armed with the data and the mapping that explain the connection points between the historical position of their community and where they are now.”
For residents living with pollution or broken water infrastructure, illustrating those disparate impacts on a map can have an even more profound effect. "When you show maps to people that have been living in a community for generations, it gives them a voice and allows them to say, 'We knew this was happening but never had the data behind it,'" Tai Lung, EJScreen lead at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), told attendees of FedGIS. "Giving people that information is such a powerful thing. Every time I see this, it both breaks my heart and makes me happy somehow at the same time."
“We have to be able to show, track, map where those funds are going and how they’re actually impacting and benefiting the community.”
Watkins shares NAACP’s work with Esri at the Maps for Your Mission session.
Disaster relief
Mapping relief after disaster
For Scott Kaplan, a volunteer who manages the Geospatial Program at Civil Air Patrol, the value of maps extends well beyond navigation. "It's about storytelling," he explained. “If I can take large amounts of data from different things and break it down into a simple picture for you, your brain goes, ‘Oh, okay that makes total sense.’”
Civil Air Patrol, an 82-year-old organization, is now a high tech volunteer auxiliary for the Air Force with thousands of members helping Americans recover from disaster. The group rescues about 150 people a year and conducts aerial and ground surveys after disasters. Kaplan only started learning GIS software a few years ago. Now he’s an evangelist for using geospatial technology in emergencies, and the halls of FedGIS 2023 were the latest campaign stop for what’s become a national mission. “It’s what I get most passionate about and why I do it as a volunteer," he said, "because never in my life did I think I could say literally we’re helping millions of Americans recover from disasters.”
Audience at plenary session.
Hear Civil Air Patrol's Scott Kaplan share how he leveraged GIS to understand the impact of covid-19 on his organization.
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Covid hit, and the national commander said, ’I have no way of knowing whether or how our members are being impacted. I don’t know how can we do our mission?’ And they asked us could we help? And so we actually created a a Survey123 app. Again, it was by by the gentleman from the Maryland wing that created that app. And it was a basic, basic app. And it just said, you know how many members are in, you know, ’What squadron are you at? How many members have been infected and how many people are being tested?’ That was the only three things we wanted to know because just again, avoid the PII info side of it. Um, and we created a dashboard that could show it in real-time as people. And then we asked them to update every Monday and for the first time from the national leadership on down, for those that needed the data, they could visualize how was Civil Air Patrol being impacted. And I think it really showed the power of, of information data, um, you know, GIS tools and geospatial information to help answer a question.
Dangermond presents the Making a Difference Award to Civil Air Patrol’s MG Phelka, John Desmarais and Kaplan.
Esri's Natalie Veal at the Maps for Your Mission session.
At Civil Air Patrol, Kaplan has assembled a worldwide team of volunteer members to help create post-disaster damage assessment data from imagery. To date, they’ve supported 14 major disasters nationally including hurricanes, flooding, fire and tornadoes.
After the recent floods in Kentucky, Civil Air Patrol’s data was some of the first information to come in. When an earthquake devastated Puerto Rico in February 2020, Civil Air Patrol’s on-the-ground assessments were essential for getting a Presidential Disaster Declaration, and after hurricane Ian, its analysis helped the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) provide direct assistance to over 5,000 Hurricane Ian survivors.
Dangermond presents the Making a Difference Award to Civil Air Patrol’s MG Phelka, John Desmarais and Kaplan.
For its recovery efforts, Kaplan and his colleagues received Esri’s Making a Difference Award at FedGIS 2023. “They’re a model for me, actually one of my heroes,” Esri president and founder Jack Dangermond said as he announced the award at the conference’s plenary session.
Economic predictions
Mapping shocks to the supply chain
Innovative maps are helping respond to crises, but they are also helping make it easier to anticipate them.
Serkan Arslanalp, an economist at the IMF, was exploring real-time vessel tracking data for monitoring economic developments in small Pacific Islands. At the same time, colleagues at Oxford University were developing methods for quantifying climate risks for ports. Why not, they thought, combine the data on a map? By tracking their risks and linkages, policymakers could see potential spillovers and better respond to shocks.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Kim Valentine and Esri’s Dan Pisut present at the plenary session.
The result, PortWatch, offers policymakers alerts, analysis and forecasts about global port activity, using near real-time data from a growing number of commercial satellites along with a range of economic and social indicators.
The tool, which won the IMF Climate Innovation Challenge in 2022, will help inform governments around the world, especially in small island developing countries. “Monitoring the ports in real-time allows you to essentially have your finger on the pulse of the economy," he said.
“GIS boosts the power of data, resulting in a more granular understanding of social, economic and environmental issues.”
Department of the Interior’s David Carter at the plenary session.
Hear IMF’s Serkan Arslanalp explain how real-time location-based data can help us better prepare for disasters globally.
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We actually saw trade volumes fall by almost 20 percent again in the Pacific region before the WHO declared covid to be a global pandemic. So up until that moment, if you had used this real-time data, we would have seen that there was a lot of shock that was coming to all these countries, but we were not using it at the time. And I think we to me, the lesson from that was that next time, if you want to be more prepared for pandemics or war or other disasters, including climate related disasters, we we should and we could use this data. But as economists, but also as policymakers. And our job as we see it is to make it facilitate an easier use of this data by partnering with institutions like Esri.
The result, PortWatch, offers policymakers alerts, analysis and forecasts about global port activity, using near real-time data from a growing number of commercial satellites along with a range of economic and social indicators.
The tool, which won the IMF Climate Innovation Challenge in 2022, will help inform governments around the world, especially in small island developing countries. “Monitoring the ports in real-time allows you to essentially have your finger on the pulse of the economy," he said.
Department of the Interior’s David Carter at the plenary session.
Built in part with data from the IMF's experimental Climate Change Indicators dashboard, PortWatch reflects a growing recognition that monitoring modern shocks requires going beyond traditional economic data. “One thing about economists: We are good at projecting trends forward many years into the future, but we are not very good at identifying turning points in the economy,” Arslanalp explained.
Amid a flood of data in an increasingly volatile world, GIS is helping locate those turning points. With its holistic, analytical view, Arslanalp said, “GIS boosts the power of data, resulting in a more granular understanding of social, economic and environmental issues." PortWatch has already drawn interest from other governments eager to build more resilience and sparked ideas for new IMF mapping projects. “And tomorrow, we can think of other applications for these approaches,” he said, “because I think we are all learning by doing.”
An image from PortWatch identifying key ports and shipping lanes.
Arslanalp sees GIS less as a specific platform or tool and more as a way of thinking. For him, it’s also a way of thinking together, by layering diverse expertise and data to solve some of the world’s toughest challenges. But, he said, anyone curious about GIS should begin with a simple problem. “Collect data, start overlaying them on a map and try to understand what you're looking at. The rest will follow from there.”
