Mapping the narrative: Spatial data to inform leaders
Kevin Strybos is an undergraduate student in the Geography Department at The University of Texas at Austin. This summer, Kevin worked at the USAID Mission in Lima, Peru, as an AidData Summer Fellow.
As a Geography student with a heavy interest in GIS and environmental management, one of the groups I was lucky to work with the most this summer was USAID/Peru’s Environment and Sustainable Growth (ESG) team. The ESG team implements programs for sustainably managing natural resources across Peru, including projects to conserve biodiversity and forest cover in the Peruvian Amazon Basin, and projects on water management of glacial melt in Peru’s Andes Mountains.
These topics and geographies may sound local, but USAID is focused on them precisely because they are also of global importance. Peru is home to 70% of the world’s tropical glaciers: critical resources for an entire region’s drinking water, irrigation, and electricity generation that are melting faster than expected. (“Think what it would be like if the Andes glaciers were gone and we had millions and millions of hungry and thirsty Southern neighbors,” said former CIA Director R. James Woolsey in 2011, illustrating the potential scale of the problem.) And the vast greenery of the Amazon Basin is so large that it actually influences rainfall patterns as far north as the American Midwest — its rapid deforestation through logging and slash-and-burn agriculture has the potential to alter global weather patterns.
Partway through the summer, the ESG’s Chief of Office Holly Ferrette and Project Management Assistant Katia Villanueva found themselves needing to communicate these weighty issues — and USAID’s work on them — to a bipartisan U.S. congressional delegation led by Representative Jeff Duncan (R-SC) that oversees approval of budgets for international development projects.
The visit provided an opportunity for the ESG team to brief these key stakeholders on some of their work in the Peruvian Amazon; specifically, ESG’s development of a logging tracking system to verify that logged woods exported by Peru and imported by the U.S. are coming from legal sources. The project’s long term goal is to hold the logging industry accountable to sustainably sourcing its products from forestry concessions (land legally set aside for logging), rather than contributing to further deforestation of non-concession forests with illegal, extractive projects.
The congressional delegation’s trip consisted in part of an Amazon River boat tour, providing the eight representatives with an up-close, in-person view of damage to the rainforest from logging. But even from the boat, Holly found it difficult to communicate the reality of the large number of extractive projects, the sheer scale of environmental degradation that is often not visible — and why USAID’s projects to address those issues mattered.
“The problem I was having is how to communicate to a very important audience the relevance of our work to their interests,” said Holly. “We needed to create narratives using words and maps to help them understand what’s going on.”
With my focus on Geographic Information Systems, the maps were where I came in. Two days before the delegation arrived, Holly came to me describing the ESG team’s need for two maps that would convey the importance and impact of USAID/Peru’s work to the representatives: one map displaying historical deforestation, and a separate map of all current extractive projects in the Peruvian Amazon.
Using data from Global Forest Watch, I first developed a map visualizing all forest loss (below, left) in the Peruvian Amazon from 2000 to 2017, and was able to identify particular areas of extreme forest loss and research their individual causes. I also created a template for updating the map on a regular basis, so USAID can monitor future forest loss in target areas. It’s my hope that as USAID continues to work in their focus regions, they can bring these updated maps to the field and locate the areas experiencing recent deforestation to better understand its causes.
Working on the second map of extractive projects (above, right) hammered home how important well-organized data libraries are, as I had to search through many sources online to find project data and combine different datasets together on the fly. Before finishing my fellowship at USAID, I made sure to assemble all my data and sources into a database for future use by my colleagues.
I was happy to learn that the maps ultimately worked to inform the congressional delegation. After the trip, Holly told me that the maps “helped tell a powerful story… [the maps] show things that are of the most interest to this group of people, and I think the congressmen were surprised.”
