UNITAR Online Catalogue
Introduction to Geospatial Information Technology (GIT) (Vanuatu)
United Nations Satellite Centre UNOSAT
Background
Pacific Island Countries are on the front line of climate change and natural hazards. These countries combine high exposure to frequent and damaging natural hazards with low capacity to manage the resulting risks. According to the World Bank, since 1950 extreme events have affected approximately 9.2 million people in the Pacific region. The CommonSensing (CS) project led by UNITAR-UNOSAT, was created with the aim to improve resilience to climate change, including disaster risk reduction, and to contribute to sustainable development in three Commonwealth Pacific island countries: Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The project aims at developing satellite-based information services that will directly match challenges and needs to support the three nations in their goals to strengthen capacity to access climate finance and report on climate funds; strengthen national and regional climate action policy; and reduce the impact and improved risk management of natural disasters and food security.
In 2019 and 2020, UNITAR-UNOSAT delivered two training sessions as part of the capacity building activities of the CS project. These sessions focused on building up the knowledge on Earth Observation and Geospatial Information Technology of technical officers across diverse ministries.
This training session will focus on USP students to introduce Earth Observation topics and Geospatial Information Technology applications for climate resilience.
Learning Objectives
At the end of this course participants should be able to:
- Define and describe the basic concepts and terminologies related to Geospatial Information Technology (GIT) and Remote Sensing (RS),
- Use basic functionalities of QGIS to manage and analyse spatial data,
- Collect geolocated field data using smartphones,
- Apply different options for symbolizing data and explain how they affect what the user takes away from the map in QGIS.
Content and Structure
The aim of this course is to provide participants with the introductory knowledge on Geographic Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS), and their applications towards achieving disaster and climate resilience.
Methodology
This is a face-to-face learning course with lectures and GIS lab assignments using local GIS datasets and real case scenarios (80% lab exercises and assignments, 20% lectures and discussions). This course is divided into 4 modules. The course is designed in a way to have a balanced approach between theoretical and practical teaching methods consisting in PowerPoint presentations, live demos, interactive sessions, group assignments, and field work. All lab exercises will be conducted with open source software such as QGIS. Students should have access to a PC and Google Classroom.
Targeted Audience
The course is designed to accommodate 22 students with no prior basic knowledge in GIS and Remote Sensing.
Additional Information
Unfortunately the course you are interested in is already reserved for a selected group of participants, as part of donor funded project. If you are interested in future opportunities, please fill up this form. Due to the high demand, we will not be able to timely answer requests via email. Thank you for your interest!